Across Morocco, a quiet revolution is taking place inside HR and finance departments, not through payroll upgrades or new banking rules, but through something far more human: financial breathing room.
For decades, employees across industries have lived in a cycle of salary-to-salary survival, juggling bills, emergencies, family responsibilities, and unexpected expenses with no safety net between the 1st and 30th of each month. Employers felt the tension too, rising advance requests, low productivity, hidden stress, and financial fatigue that no wellness program could fix.
Enter PayLik, a Moroccan fintech-HR platform that rewrote the script. Instead of waiting for payday, PayLik gives employees access to a portion of their earned wages whenever they need it, safely, instantly, and without the shame or complexity of traditional salary advances. What started as an earned-wage-access solution quickly evolved into a financial wellness super-app, layering automated expense claims, bonuses, benefits management, savings tools, and bill-payment features into a single platform.
Today, PayLik is backed by UM6P Ventures, 212 Founders, and CDG Invest, and is rapidly becoming one of Morocco’s most influential HR-fintech innovations. But to understand the company’s impact, you must understand the founder who built it.
The Founder Behind PayLik: Engineering Precision Meets Human-Centric Finance
PayLik’s story begins with Othmane Bennani Smires, the Founder and CEO, an engineer by training, a strategist by practice, and a builder by instinct. Before launching PayLik, Othmane spent over a decade moving across engineering, consulting, and financial sectors, with roles at ISH, PwC, GE Healthcare, and CORIA. To him, each stop was an education in inefficiency, friction, and the invisible pain points that quietly drain organizations.
The turning point came during his consulting years. Othmane noticed that no matter how sophisticated a company’s systems were, one challenge surfaced repeatedly: employee financial stress. It affected focus. It affected retention. It affected productivity. And yet, every employer treated it as a private issue.
“That’s when it clicked,” he would later tell colleagues. “The problem wasn’t based on salary levels, it was salary timing.”
Armed with a BSc in Mechanical Engineering from INSA Rouen (2004 – 2009) and a mind wired for problem-solving, Othmane began sketching what would become PayLik – a system designed to restore liquidity, dignity, and financial confidence to the workforce. He envisioned a platform that was both technically precise and deeply empathetic. Not banking. Not lending. Simply fair access to one’s own money.
A Super-App Built for Morocco’s Workforce Reality
What started as earned wage access grew into an end-to-end financial control panel for employers and employees:
For Employees
- Access a portion of earned income instantly
- Pay bills through the app
- Build savings automatically
- Track financial health in real time
- Use a prepaid card for secure spending
For Employers
- Automate salary advances – zero administrative burden
- Manage bonuses, reimbursements, and benefits
- Centralize financial workflows
- Reduce cashflow shocks
- Improve retention by reducing employee stress
PayLik is beyond digitizing payroll processes, it’s redefining the employer-employee financial relationship.
Why PayLik Is Now an HR Imperative
In 2024, CDG Invest joined the investor roster, a major validation signal. Corporate leaders saw what HR experts had long suspected: financial wellbeing is no longer a perk. It is infrastructure.
PayLik is winning because its value is measurable:
- Fewer advance requests
- Reduced absenteeism
- Higher retention
- More focused employees
- A stronger employer brand
With Morocco’s labor market becoming more competitive, PayLik gives companies something rare: an advantage that touches real life, not spreadsheets.
A Vision for Africa
While rooted in Casablanca, PayLik was never designed to stay local. Its model solves a global emerging-market problem, financial instability caused not by poverty, but by timing. As companies across Africa modernize and digitize HR, PayLik is positioning itself as the continent’s leading financial-wellness engine.
The premise is simple:
When people breathe financially, companies breathe operationally.
And PayLik is building the oxygen mask.
