08 Oct The Fragmented And Disjointed Network And Web Of African Online Payments
Africa is such an interesting place for eCommerce and online payment. Talking through the network and web of payment capability across the 54 countries . . . It is a mission for multinational operators to set up in territory from an online payments perspective and comply with all the regulations of local licensing, crossborder payment permissions, reporting into the central banks, creation and registration of a local legal entity, the need in some cases for a local shareholder. Let’s start with card which is mainly in Nigeria, South Africa and to a certain extent Kenya. African Payment Solutions has an aggregator facility in the key territories and can make things a lot easier for multinational eCommerce merchants looking for a payment provider to take the pain out of local eCommerce trading and online payment at the checkout. In order for online payment by card to have favourable levels of acceptance and conversion rates, local settlement is important, There are disparate systems like card schemes who do some banks, there are banks who have their own bespoke gateway, gateways who do a few of the banks but not others. Mostly these payment providers service one or two countries at most. When it comes to mobile money there are a number of individual payment providers in each territory. Mobile money aggregators trying to knit together the main mobile money payment methods like MTN Mobile Money, Vodafone Cash, Tigo Cash, M-Pesa, Airtel Money. They mostly have wallets and will settle into a local bank account. Most of them only do for example one country like Ghana, or Kenya and Tanzania. This is a long story. I could tell you more about this fragmented and disjointed collaboration of African online payment capability, but you get the picture. This leads me on to African Payment Solutions - our mission is to take the pain out of multinational eCommerce expansion across the continent from an online payment and eCommerce payment perspective. We’ve lived here for many years, we have twenty years African payment experience. We know the turf. It’s not an exact science, but the opportunity is big, worth it, and we will help you have the softest landing.