Grace Ashiru
EBANX, an international fintech company, has announced that it intends to expand its payment gateway solution and operations to Africa. This will be the first time these endeavours will take place outside Latin America.
This 10-year-old unicorn has already handled more than $1 billion in transactions. While it is present in 15 countries across Latin America, its primary focus will initially be on mobile money in Africa. In a statement, the company’s co-founder and CEO, Joo Del Valle, noted that even though the digital economy in Africa is in its infancy, the continent’s tremendous untapped potential was the driving force behind the choice.
Africa’s rapidly expanding digital economy is still in its infant stages, and analysts anticipate that it will continue to expand vertically and horizontally over the next few decades.EBANX, in collaboration with other local companies, will catalyze the realization of the many advantages associated with a digital economy expeditiously.
Africa’s digital economy is estimated to be worth $115 billion by Endeavor in June 2022. This is because of the effects of COVID-19, a young population, and steadily rising digital penetration rates.
Late in August, EBANX began operations in Kenya, South Africa, and Nigeria. These three nations, along with Egypt, account for 32% of the continent’s population, 51% of its GDP, and 73% of the startup accelerators currently operating in Africa.
Pipefy is a low-code platform for managing workflows that was started in 2015 in Latin America. It is used in more than two hundred nations around the world. EBANX is Pipefy’s payments partner in Africa.
Bringing our products to new nations in Africa speaks directly to the objective of EBANX, which is to create access. The addition of Pipefy as a merchant makes this occasion even more meaningful to us.
Expanding solutions and services in areas with lots of potentials,” The President of Global Payments at EBANX, Paula Bellizia, said in a statement.
In a manner that is analogous to what EBANX did in South America, the company intends to concentrate its approach on collaborations and partnerships with merchants from across the world. This organization handles payment processing for over a thousand different digital businesses in Latin America, including Airbnb and Uber.
After researching the area and developing a comprehensive awareness of the local organizations, players, and difficulties within, We are going to Africa to offer local payment solutions to help the digital economy grow quickly and bring more people into the financial system.
“offering improved access to a large assortment of goods/services from merchants all over the globe who are interested in boosting their market share there, ” Bellizia added.
The company will also try to figure out what kinds of local payments are popular in each country where it is expanding. In South Africa, online shoppers can use internet banking to make an EFT (Electronic Funds Transfer) that gets checked immediately.
EFT is the second most popular online payment method in South Africa today. Similar to M-Pesa, it would offer a mobile banking service in Kenya that will enable users to save and transfer money and pay for online shopping using their mobile phones.
It will offer USSD and bank transfer services in Nigeria. Customers will be able to pay for their e-commerce shopping using the former. This session-based protocol goes via the GSM signalling channel to query information and trigger services. Customers will be able to make fast and simple payments for their online purchases using this method; It does not need the usage of a credit card or debit card to complete the transaction..
