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According to Oviosu, Visa and Paga’s engineering teams have already started working together and Paga expects to roll-out these new options in Nigeria sometime in second-quarter 2020.

“Based on the partnership, we’re going to launch QR codes and NFC [payments] into the market in Nigeria — alternative ways of receiving payments than bringing out a physical card,” said Oviosu.

As it grows abroad, Paga faces greater competition in Nigeria. For the last decade, South Africa and Kenya — with the success of Safaricom’s  M-Pesa product — have been Africa’s standouts in digital payments.But over the last several years, Nigeria has become a magnet for VC and fintech startups. This trend reached a high-point in 2019 when Chinese investors put $220 million into Opera owned OPay and Transsion backed PalmPay — two fledgling startups with plans to scale in Nigeria and broader Africa.

With its Apposit acquisition and continued expansion, PayPal may become more than a model for Paga.Founder Tayo Oviosu sees big fintech players, such as PayPal and Alipay, as future competitors with Paga’s plans to move into more emerging markets.

Takyi-Appiah says he saw opportunity in the fact that customers had to wait for days and queue up to obtain remittances sent to banks. Foreign expansion soon followed, and Zeepay now counts Côte d’Ivoire and Zimbabwe as its second- and third-largest markets.

Ghana’s Zeepay plans to raise $10m in equity funding to support the creation of new mobile-money hubs in East and Southern Africa, Andrew Takyi-Appiah, co-founder and managing director, tells The Africa Report. The new hubs, which will include processing centres and back offices, are likely to be in Rwanda and South Africa, says Takyi-Appiah from Accra. He adds that the use of Swahili in Rwanda makes it a good platform from which to reach out to other markets in the region.

JUMO offers a wide range of services to users in emerging markets via partnerships with other financial institutions

JUMO offers financial services infrastructure to third parties and has served over 15 million customers across countries, including Ghana, Kenya, Pakistan, and Tanzania, and it plans to use the fresh capital to launch new products and expand into new markets: It's set to launch in Bangladesh, India, Côte d'Ivoire, and Nigeria soon, per its website.

South African fintech JUMO scooped up $55 million in funding

Cependant, l’application, qui se rapproche de ce que fait Lydia en Europe, n’est pas limitée au marché nigérian. En effet, la société cherche à étendre ses activités en Afrique de l’Ouest et au-delà. En janvier, Paga a ainsi mis la main sur la société éthiopienne Apposit pour se développer dans ce pays d’Afrique de l’Est. L’Éthiopie est le deuxième pays le plus peuplé d’Afrique avec 109 millions d’habitants, derrière le Nigeria et ses 200 millions d’habitants. Paga a également ouvert un bureau au Mexique pour déployer son service de paiement mobile cette année. Une expansion à l’international qui traduit les ambitions de la start-up de devenir une plateforme FinTech de référence dans les pays émergents.

So far JUMO has analysed more than 33 terabytes of data to serve more than nine million customers in seven countries across Africa and Asia, including Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, Zambia and Pakistan.

Its mission is to build and operate inclusive digital banking marketplaces to advance financial inclusion for the 80 per cent of the world’s population who are excluded or underserved by traditional financial services.

As an investor partner, LeapFrog’s financial services expertise is being used for product design and multi-country rollouts, to turbocharge Jumo’s growth and spur financial inclusion across Africa.

While refugees need immediate humanitarian aid, of course, they generally struggle to find work or start a business over the long-term. That’s, in part, because financial institutions usually won’t lend to them. The fund also will be the first institutional investment opportunity from Kiva Capital Management, an asset manager slated to launch as a subsidiary later this year. The organization describes it as "impact-first", that is, returns will be concessionary.

African fintech startup Jumo has pulled in a fresh $12.5 million to add more fuel for its expansion into Asia Pacific.

Jumo specializes in social impact financial products, such as microloans, savings and insurance.

It started in Tanzania, and today claims to have originated more than $1 billion in loans.

The company will continue to develop and expand its offering to provide a range of product development and payments services.Kobus Ehlers, Firepay CEO, said: “Our team is looking forward to building out our payments platform to solve the real-world payments problems we have always focused on, and to provide customers with the best experience possible. We’re excited to work with Standard Bank in our mission to achieve this both in South Africa and across the continent.”

“We are excited about working more closely with the Firepay team and think that there is an excellent strategic fit between their capabilities and Standard Bank’s vision for a truly universal bank, both in South Africa and throughout the African continent,” said Wendy Pienaar, SBSA Head of Emerging Payments.“Firepay’s experienced team and industry know-how will be used to bolster Standard Bank’s emerging payments strategy,” she added.In addition to SnapScan, the Firepay team’s technology platform already enables payments for several clients, including WeChat and Masterpass.

“We are excited about working more closely with the Firepay team and think that there is an excellent strategic fit between their capabilities and Standard Bank’s vision for a truly universal bank, both in South Africa and throughout the African continent,” said Wendy Pienaar, SBSA Head of Emerging Payments.“Firepay’s experienced team and industry know-how will be used to bolster Standard Bank’s emerging payments strategy,” she added.In addition to SnapScan, the Firepay team’s technology platform already enables payments for several clients, including WeChat and Masterpass.

Nigerian fintech firm Carbon — an early-stage financial services startup based in Lagos — has posted on its website financials audited by KPMG.This comes four months after the company obtained a credit rating as a pre-IPO venture. Carbon — which recently rebranded its OneFi holding company and PayLater product titles into one name — plans to continue releasing its financial results on an annual basis, co-founder and CEO Chijioke Dozie told TechCrunch.This may not be totally unheard of in other global tech markets, but for startups in Africa’s big tech hubs — such as Nigeria — it’s a rarity.One of the first glimpses into startup financials in Nigeria came when Jumia shareholder Rocket Internet went public in 2014, which required it to include limited Jumia data in its annual report. The accompanying prospectus to Jumia’s listing this year on the New York Stock Exchange offered the most expansive financial data to date on a tech venture operating in Africa.Prior to this — and still for the most part — companies in the continent’s (mostly) pre-public (earlier-stage) startup hubs — such as Nigeria — provide little to no financial performance info.“Typically, in the local market, we have not seen a lot of voluntary transparency or the availability of data,” said Lexi Novitske — a Lagos-based VC investor at Acuity Venture Partners.“Most startups are concerned such disclosure could expose losses, give market intel to competitors or attract unwanted attention from regulators. It could also lead to negative negotiation leverage if partners saw that they were making good returns.”So why’d Carbon go to the trouble of putting its pre-public accounting out in the open for anyone to see?

Clients and recruiting were two reasons. “From a customer perspective, we are trying to get people to trust us with their financial services…so they can see this is the institution I’m dealing with and this is their financial position,” explained Carbon’s Dozie.Carbon has evolved from its original focus as an online lender to offer a broader array of mobile-based financial services — including payments, investment products, credit reports and business banking services. In March, the company acquired Nigerian payment solutions company Amplify for an undisclosed amount.By stats offered by Briter Bridges and a 2018 WeeTracker survey, fintech now receives the bulk of VC capital and deal-flow to African startups, many of which are attempting to reach the continent’s large unbanked and underbanked populations.Carbon fits into that category and its CEO believes being upfront about the startup’s financial position will attract top talent. “From a recruitment perspective, we want recruits to know we have good prospects — that this is a company that’s doing well and wants to keep doing well,” said Dozie.That impression is buoyed by Carbon’s initial results, which were fairly positive for a Series A-stage startup. The company had revenues in 2018 of $10 million, according to its online annual report, and turned a profit of around $500,000.It’s helped with recruiting interest, according to Dozie, who said he’d marked an increase in candidates inquiring about open positions since the results were posted.

we don’t get considered because investors don’t really think that you can get the results or this performance in the markets that we’re in,” he added — noting that Carbon has operations in Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa and is considering expansion in Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, DRC and Egypt.Investor Lexi Novitske thinks Carbon offering financial performance data is a good thing for Africa’s tech ecosystem. “The move builds trust from clients, partners or investors in a market where there is not a lot of openness,” she said. “I am encouraged to see how other companies will react. My hope is that more will openly report their own metrics…”Dozie says the company will continue to post audited financials on an annual basis, even if they show losses. If the startup continues to expand, attract capital and talent and grow revenues, other Nigerian fintech firms may follow suit.

Visa has entered a partnership with Nigeria based startup Paga on payments and technology.Founded in Lagos, Paga scaled its fintech business in West Africa, before targeting expansion in Ethiopia and Mexico.The startup has created a multi-channel network for over 14 million customers in Nigeria to transfer money, pay-bills and buy things digitally through its mobile-app or 24,840 agents.The new arrangement allows Paga account holders to transact on Visa’s global network. It will also see both companies work together on tech.The collaboration reflects a strategy of the American financial services giant to expand in Africa working with the continent’s top startups.

In January, Flutterwave announced a takedown of US$35 million to boost its expansion into sub-Saharan Francophone markets and North Africa. A month later, Jumo pushed its cumulative fundraising since 2015 to nearly US$150 million with a successful plea for cash to back its initiatives in Côte D’Ivoire, Nigeria and elsewhere on the continent.

The startup intends to expand its geographical presence nationwide, besides its network of small enterprises, Nouh elaborated.Founded last year, Capiter is a mobile app connecting grocery stores and retail markets to leading food suppliers in the country, the CEO added.The company also plans to start its expansion with Alexandria and the Nile Delta area over the coming period, Nouh said.