11 Oct A New Landscape of Cross Border Payments is Emerging for Online Payments with eCommerce Payment Providers Across Africa
I mentioned in a previous blog about how I believe the lines of PayTech across Africa are blurring. The collapsing of payment verticals like wallets, remittances, acquiring, mobile monies is starting to make it difficult to differentiate between an online payments provider, a mobile money aggregator, a remittance company, and now digital currency payment providers and platforms. For example take the two main global cross border digital payment providers Ripple and Stellar who have seemingly unlimited stashes for venture capital investment in DEFI and payments ventures that would improve their knowledge of the future of payment, and the promotion, implementation and use of their protocols and cryptocurrencies. Ripple Labs is a for-profit company and Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) is a nonprofit. In practice, however, the line becomes a bit more blurred. Stellar is moving towards B2B cross-border payments in its partnership with IBM World Wire. Ripple Labs CEO, Brad Garlinghouse, was recently discussing how Ripple’s XRP is leading the fight against poor financial infrastructure and banking the unbanked. As Stellar’s guiding philosophy is one of open source development; it may be a better suited consumer driven platform with a variety of DApps and ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings). Ripple is creating the architecture and framework to onboard major institutional players. Enter the African fray, Mojaloop which is bringing together interoperability of the myriad of mobile monies across the African continent which are even disconnected in some instances with the same payment method in a different country. Mojaloop is open source software that can be used by the mobile payment providers across Africa to link with each other and facilitate cross chain transactions between providers. Throw into the mix the recent MasterCard announcement of a partnership with Airtel Money to link a virtual card to each mobile money account. Does this mean that their 100 million African mobile phone users in 14 African countries will now be able to buy goods at any merchant that accepts MasterCard? All of these collaborations are creating a network of seamless, borderless transacting that is catalysing online payments providers in their mission to become non-jurisdictional in their service of eCommerce merchants on the one had and aspirant and connected African consumers on the other.