How Two Nigerian Are Revolutionizing Online Payments In Africa

Over the years, making payment online is hard for small and large-scale business owners, which means that the lack of availability of customers to make payment online despite having a good business product to offer, led to two Nigerian to provide a solution to the online payment in Nigeria and Africa.

The duo of Sola Akinlade and Ezra Olubi decided to do something about the problem of online payment in Africa with Paystack based on the personal experiences of them having challenges to outgrow their businesses online. The platform Sola and Ezra built was called Paystak, which helps Nigerian – and African businesses to accept payments from anyone, anywhere in the world – through debit, credit cards, and direct bank debits.

The platform is meant for business owners to connect Paystack to their website in order for them to start receiving online payments in as little as 30 minutes! This platform is meant for both small and large-scale business to get paid and grow their businesses – and further allowing customers feel safer about revealing their card information – in way less time than it used to take in the past.

Since the official launch in January 2016, Paystack has grown steadily and currently serves over 2,000 merchants in Nigeria which includes iRoko TV, Nairabet, Printivo, Jobberman, e.t.c and went from processing N500,000 at launch to processing over N600 million in April 2017. Paystack is now in early talks to expand to Ghana and Kenya.

The CEO of the company had a chat with online tabloid Konbini Nigeria, where he disclosed the future plans for the company :

“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 (merchants and their paying customers) interact with money and create a sort of financial personal assistant embedded into their daily lives to make it easier.”

Ever since the inception of the company, they has included 10 new staffs to their growing list of team.  Despite their huge success in a short period of time, Paystack believes that there is still room for improvement in the payments sector, and they plan to continue to build capacity to tend to the pain points of Nigerians – and Africans.

In the past, 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.