Taptap Send Brand Guidelines: A 2018 Remittance App From the GiveDirectly Founders

From GiveDirectly to transfers for individuals.

Taptap Send is the work of two co-founders, Michael Faye and Paul Niehaus. The company says it launched in 2018, and the Khaleej Times gave the same founding year and names in October 2025; PYMNTS, reporting a funding round in December 2021, put the launch in 2019, so the sources differ by a year. Bangladesh’s The Daily Star wrote in May 2024 that the company was founded by two Harvard alumni and has its head offices in London and New York City. Faye leads the company as chief executive, as The Paypers also noted in October 2026.

In an essay on the company’s site titled “Why we started Taptap Send,” Faye places the app as the next step in a long collaboration with Niehaus. GiveDirectly, he writes, first did this work of moving money into emerging markets for philanthropic capital; Segovia did it for businesses; and Taptap Send was built to do it for individuals. The essay credits the spread of mobile money, through which a large share of people in emerging markets gained a digital account on their phones, with making a simple mobile-to-mobile transfer service possible, and says the hard part lay in the financial and technical plumbing behind the screen and in a wide network of partners.

The same essay sets out the company’s values. It describes an “impact first” rule of only building products in customers’ interests, and a value it calls “love the particular,” which means tailoring the product to each community rather than one design for all. At the time of writing, Faye said, the team came from 25 countries and spoke more than 30 languages, and the company had recently opened markets including Cameroon, Kenya and Morocco and begun accepting transfers sent from Canada.

Sending countries, destinations and licences.

Taptap Send is an app-only service. Its About page says the company is live in the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, the UAE and across the EU, and sends to more than 90 destinations, from Nigeria, Senegal and Ghana to Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Mexico and Brazil, with more launching regularly. It describes itself as a venture-backed start-up and names Reid Hoffman, the Omidyar Network and Helios among its investors. PYMNTS reported its Series B round in December 2021, which the company said would fund new communities, product work and hiring.

The company frames its purpose around a United Nations goal. Its About page says it is working towards the Sustainable Development Goal of bringing down the cost of cross-border remittances by 2030, and Faye’s essay says Taptap Send is, as far as the company is aware, the only remittance company to have publicly committed to that target. Those are company statements.

The Gulf has become a larger part of the map. The Khaleej Times reported that Taptap Send launched in the UAE in June 2023, and that in October 2025 transfers from the UAE were temporarily paused, with the app telling users the service was being upgraded. The Paypers reported on 15 October 2026 that the company holds three licences from the Central Bank of the UAE, for stored value facilities, retail payment services and exchange business, and that it had launched in Bahrain after receiving a Payment Service Provider licence from the Central Bank of Bahrain, its second market in the Gulf Cooperation Council. The same report said users in more than 35 countries could send to recipients in over 90 destination markets. In the United States, the company’s site says its entity TapTap Send Payments Co. is licensed as a money transmitter by the New York Department of Financial Services.

How the category looks.

Money-transfer brands work in two places at once: at a shop counter, where a sign has to be read from across the street, and on a phone screen, where the same name has to sit in a small app icon. The guides in this set look at how each brand handles that double job, from strong single-colour wordmarks in yellow, green, orange or purple to the short, easily spoken names that customers repeat to relatives abroad.

The guides also look at the practical pages these brands publish: exchange-rate calculators that show what a recipient will receive, lists of countries and corridors, and finders for agent locations. The networks behind those finders are large by the companies’ own counts: MoneyGram gives more than 480,000 retail locations, and Ria had more than 639,000 locations at the end of 2025, according to English Wikipedia. Partners such as Walmart, post offices and convenience-store chains appear alongside the brands’ own shops.

Language is part of the design. The guides note where pages, apps and customer service are offered in several languages for customers who send money to families in other countries; MoneyGram, for example, says its rebuilt app and website of October 2026 support 40 languages.

The small print matters too. MoneyGram’s website lists its licences as a money transmitter, and the guides note such licence and regulatory disclosures, along with complaint routes and, for listed companies or listed parents, investor pages with reports and filings. Each guide sets out what can be checked about the brand — who founded it, who owns it today, and how its name and network have grown — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Partners, pauses and new corridors.

Receiving markets depend on local partners, and one such arrangement was interrupted in Ghana. On 11 November 2024 GhanaWeb, citing Starr FM, reported that Taptap Send had temporarily paused transfers to Ghana. In a statement published by GhanaWeb on 13 December 2024, the company said the Bank of Ghana had suspended its partnership with local banks and fintech companies for one month, in a matter concerning its newly launched wallet product, and that the central bank lifted the suspension on 4 December 2024, ahead of the deadline, allowing transfers to Ghana to resume. The company said its regulatory status remained intact.

Other partnerships have widened the list of destinations. Viet Nam News reported on 4 June 2026 that Vietnam Prosperity Joint Stock Commercial Bank, known as VPBank, and Taptap Send had signed a strategic partnership in Hanoi to expand inbound remittances to Viet Nam, letting individuals receive transfers sent through the app. In the same statement on Ghana, the company described itself as a digital-only cross-border money transfer service offered through regulated entities in the UK, Europe, the USA, Canada and the UAE.

The company’s pages keep to short, direct copy in several languages, with the About page offered in English, French, German, Spanish and Italian. Its visual identity is not set out in any public brand book, so the tones and type in this guide are a reading of the register rather than an official specification.

For a design guide, Taptap Send shows how a remittance app can lead with community and mission: a two-word name, plain multilingual copy and a story told in its founder’s own words. Compare the app-first Remitly and the money-transfer brand Wise. For this guide we use dusk violet, deep night, lilac mist and marigold with a rounded modern sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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