Launching Offline Payments in Nigeria

Recap of the launch event (in glorious pictures)

Introduction

We organised this event to launch the capability for developers in Nigeria to offer payment functionality to their end users using offline channels.

This is something we are excited about because it opens up infrastructure that valuable solutions can be built on top of.

From my previous article announcing Africa’s Talking and Flutterwave’s partnership;

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

All smiles from Team AT !!

Registration ongoing as we were getting prepared to start

The first part of the agenda involved each of the companies introducing themselves and giving a breakdown on what they do for the ecosystem

Samuel Gikandi, AT CEO and Joe Senior Engineer Flutterwave giving a brief introduction of AT and Flutterwave

What exactly did it mean to offer offline payments through communication channels?

Well…

1. Building a money solution

As Gbonjubola Amuda, Software Engineer at Flutterwave INC said in her presentation;

Mobile Money Ingredients:

Mobile + Communication Link + Money!

She took the attendees though sample code showing how to create a mobile money application using Africa’s Talking USSD and Flutterwave APIs for payment processing.

From Gbonjubola’s slides. You can find them here

Want to delve deeper in this, you can find the source code for her demo on her github

Real Life applications demo: Airtime Vending + Mobile Checkout

Testing out one of Stephen’s USSD applications

So how does all this work in real life?

Stephen Afam Osemene (The Dreamer), Developer Relations for Africa’s Talking Nigeria took us through a couple of demos of simple USSD applications that you can build in a day!

His last two demos touched on adding payment functionality on a USSD flow. Whether it is buying airtime through USSD or initiating mobile checkout from an e-commerce website.

We have documented the APIs necessary to understand what the APIs can do to achieve this and many more applications.

Check out Bank and Card Payments APIs on our docs

You can reach Stephen directly on our developers Slack. His handle>>(‘@StephenAfamO’) just in case you want to understand this process further.

screen grab of the various options available from the docs page

Recap

Honestly, this was a very interactive event that allowed us to share ideas with the developers and companies that were present, both at the event and online.

We believe this is the starting point of a larger conversation around more accessible payments options and functionality both for developers and consumers across the continent

Huge thanks to those who joined us during the event. We hope you got inspired to build the future on us.

There was a recording of the event, therefore if you were not able to join us, you can watch that and catch up.

Special shout out to those who made this day a success:

1. Modupe and Koromone Koroye from Flutterwave for working together to bring this event to life.
2. Story Teller and Master of the Lens Rotimi Okungbaye, what can I say that I haven’t said already, thank you for capturing the pure soul of this future we are building.
3. Samuel Gikandi for your inspiring and charismatic talk. You don’t do it often but when you do, it is literally LIT!!!!
4. Gbonjubola Amuda and Joe Olaoye for your amazing talks.
5. …and Stephen Afam Osemene for your demos that tied this whole thing together.

***Join us on Slack***