Paga: A Hybrid Payments Infrastructure for Online and Offline Customers Made in Nigeria

Tayo Oviosu, Founder and CEO of Paga, a payments and financial services ecosystem made in Nigeria, explains what makes the company different from the competition.

“At Paga, we are building a payments and financial services ecosystem that is very similar to PayPal or Square. Essentially what we are doing is solving payments and financial services for consumers on one side with the Paga brand, and for sellers on the other side with our Doroki brand. What we believe fundamentally is that in today’s Africa to scale, you need a hybrid digital and physical approach. Cash is not going anywhere anytime soon and for payments, onramps and offramps to cash are still needed and banks’ market penetration is really low. In Nigeria for example, it is somewhere between 12% and 20%”, says Tayo Oviosu.

“What we have done is build a hybrid payments infrastructure for the online and the offline customer. This is a big differentiation point for the Paga Group. We are taking an ecosystem approach to how we are addressing the needs of consumers. We have built out the ramps to cash. We call that an agent at work. These are the mom-and-pop shops, pharmacies, grocery stores. The person in the neighborhood community who you go to buy bread, milk and sugar. That person can offer financial services to people in their community and it is a bridge for the offline to online. We are seeing this approach work very well. We now have over 19 million users on our platform and 15.4 million of them go to our agents on a regular basis and we are seeing the transaction process on Paga growing tremendously. It took us from 2012 to 2020 to process our first 2 trillion naira, but it is going to take us only 24 months to the next 2 trillion. The speed of acceleration on our platform is very impressive”, he adds.

ABOUT PAGA: Paga was founded in early 2009 with a purpose to make it simple for one billion people to access and use money. Paga is solving two key problems that exist around the world – eliminating the use of cash for transactions and access to financial services. Paga is a payments and financial services ecosystem for Africa. Its ecosystem is similar to that of Square and PayPal as Paga focuses on helping both consumers and sellers pay, get paid, and access financial services. Paga enables consumers to access and use money in the most convenient way for them, whether that is through a neighborhood store (agents) or via their mobile phone (smartphone or feature phone). Paga also enables sellers to sell more efficiently and access financing.

For more information, please visit: www.mypaga.com.

FAIR USE POLICY
This material (including media content) may not be published, broadcasted, rewritten, or redistributed. However, linking directly to the page (including the source, i.e. Marcopolis.net) is permitted and encouraged.