Enabling Nigerian Developers with the Power of Communications and Payments
At approximately 10.30 PM (WAT), October 5th, 2017 in Lagos Nigeria, the partnership between Africa’s Talking, a Communications API focused company and Flutterwave, a Payments API company officially kicked off
We have an event to showcase solutions that are possible through this partnership on 11th November 2017, be sure to register to attend here!!
The Problem
We introduced Payments as a product in Kenya early this year. It was an obvious decision considering the role mobile money plays in the economy. As of 2017, MPESA, Safaricom’s mobile money platform boasts of 19 Million active monthly users. Therefore, no business or service in Kenya can ignore mobile money,whether at the merchant or at the personal level.
With this in mind, we worked on providing a way for our users to also process mobile money transactions through our API platform.
This has seen interesting products come up from developers in the country.
- Creating Micro finance services running on USSD with the ability of accepting money and paying out loans.
- Buy tickets for various purposes (concerts, bus rides etc)
- Messenger bot for ordering and paying for food from a restaurant
Africa’s Talking Payments API opens developers to diverse opportunities and the ability to build great services not only in Kenya but across the continent.
Across the continent. How? Every country is different.
That is a lesson we learnt when we opened up shop in Nigeria. The Payments landscape is very fragmented. One thing we had to do was to understand how this system works. Biggest take away was that banks play a huge and primary role in this.
Nigerians have been trying to solve this payments puzzle and this has seen a number of innovative solutions come up.
The Journey
Throughout this year, we have put a lot of focus on building out our products in Nigeria as well as forming new partnerships. This has seen us interact with a lot of developers in the space as we introduced our APIs to them. More often than not, the concept of payments kept coming up.
It was painful admitting that we hadn’t yet figured that part out. We had leads, but nothing concrete.
Then, about a month back, we had the opportunity of hosting these guys in our office in Lagos
They were preparing for a forLoop event, with the theme of building for the next billion users. We went through an interactive deep dive session on everything USSD, right from what it is, how it works and how applications are built on it that make it a platform to use in building for the next billion users.
At the end of this session, we went further to discuss how else you can add value to USSD interactions. Payments is a huge part of this, and they agreed. With payments integrated in USSD or SMS sessions, you can create a fully fledged business, right from registration to the point users become your customers.
We needed to make it happen.
The Solution
I’m sure you have heard this before; most times, there is no need to reinvent the wheel. If we choose to, we could go out and reach out to banks and start integrating with them to offer our developers this service, but did we have to?
We sat down with the team from Flutterwave shortly after to figure out what we could do together. I do not think we fully realized what we wanted to achieve from that meeting but an hour in, all of us in that room completely understood the immense potential of this partnership.
Flutterwave have integrated with banks in Nigeria and exposed their services through APIs on their platform. They have opened up many opportunities for developers and businesses to process payments through their infrastructure.
Through them, we can now start the conversation of offering Payments capabilities to our developers using our communication APIs.
What does this mean?
Possibilities are endless when communications and payments are on one unified platform. Aside from taking advantage of the accessibility offered by using communication APIs, being able to meet the end user where they are, and offering a service that is valuable and convenient enough for them is not something that you can ignore
I don’t know if you can tell by now, but we are extremely excited about this opportunity. We would like to share this with developers in Nigeria, and help them along as they explore and build out their products and services.
Therefore, we are excited to invite you to an event we are organizing on Bridging the Gap between Technology and Offline Payments. This will be on the 11th of November at StartZone, Gbagada, Lagos.
Be sure to save your slot by registering for there event , space is limited at the venue.
|Register Here|
For those who want to keep up with the event and cannot make it, you can find the live stream and chatter on our social media accounts using the hashtag #MoneyTalks
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