Paystack is Revolutionizing Online Payments in Africa
Initially, online payments in Nigeria were not as seamless as they are now. Customers had a hard time paying online, and businesses still had to do a lot of work to accept these payments. But, the African financial space has gotten better over time and it is a ray of sunshine that quite a number of online payment platforms are now available to ensure a fast and time-saving transactions through the web.
Sola Akinlade and Ezra Olubi are one of the Nigerians who decided to do something to facilitate this cause with their online payment platform, Paystack founded in 2016.
Paystack is a platform that helps Nigerian and African businesses accept payments from anyone, anywhere in the world – through debit, credit cards, and direct bank debits.
They built Paystack as a result of personal need as they were entrepreneurs themselves, working on their respective businesses which were facing online payment challenges at that time.
With their platform, all businesses now have to do is connect Paystack to their websites and start receiving online payments in as little as 30 minutes. Paystack is not just helping existing businesses accept payments, it is also allowing new businesses to get started, get paid and grow their businesses and allowing customers feel safer about revealing their card information in way less time than it used to take in the past.
Paystack is sticking to their promise of helping Nigerians make simple and easy payment, and to delight customers with seamless payment experience as portrayed on their website, “building a business is hard. Getting paid shouldn’t be”.
Since the official launch in January 2016, Paystack has grown steadily and currently serves over 2,000 merchants in Nigeria and went from processing N500,000 at launch to processing over N600 million in April 2017. Being a growth engine for a new generation of innovative, forward-looking organizations operating in Africa, they are trusted by over 30,000 businesses for business growth and Paystack is now in early talks to expand to Ghana and Kenya.
In a recent interview about the company’s future plans, Paystack CEO, Sola, said: “Despite the progress we have made, there is a lot of room for improvement. We have the unbanked, the financially excluded who are yet to experience the convenience of online payments. We aim to change the way everyone interacts with money and create a sort of financial personal assistant embedded into their daily lives to make it easier.”
Previously, Sola developed software projects for banks and worked on Precurio, a document management software, which has gone on to be interpreted in 6 languages and has had over 200,000 downloads; while Ezra worked with online job portal, Jobberman and later on, Delivery Science.
Paystack is not slowing down, they believe that there’s still room for improvement in the payments sector, and they plan to continue to build capacity to tend to the needs of Nigerians and Africans generally.
