Ebanx, a global payments fintech company has announced plans to expand its operations and payments solutions for the first time in Africa.
The 10-year-old Brazilian company which is already present in 15 Latin American countries revealed this last month, at the sixth edition of the annual Latin America Summit powered by EBANX in Mexico City.
The fintech unicorn who has processed over $1 billion in payments believes the three African countries (South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria) are the next big growth frontier for digital payments and the digital market during the 2020s.
“Africa is now bursting with growth potential. Digital adoption and consumption of online goods and services have accelerated rapidly within its countries, and investment capital has been pouring into the region,” said Paula Bellizia, President, Global Payments at Ebanx said in a statement.
“After studying the region and building a deep understanding of its local players, entities, and challenges, we are diving into Africa to provide local payments solutions that will help build the digital economy at a rapid pace,” Bellizia further said.
He also added that it will broader drive financial inclusion for its population, and provide greater access to a variety of goods and services from global merchants interested in building their market share there.
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João Del Valle, Chief Executive Officer, and Co-founder, of Ebanx, noted that Africa’s fast-growing digital economy is only in its early days, and it is projected to grow up and to the right for the next few decades.
“Together with local players, Ebanx will be a catalyst to realize the many benefits of a digital economy even faster.”
According to a June 2022 report by Endeavor with contributions from McKinsey & Company, Africa’s digital opportunity is estimated at $115billion and is expected to hit $712billion by 2050. The growth is driven by strong underlying fundamentals, accelerated by COVID-19.
On how the company plans to penetrate Nigeria, it disclosed that it will experiment with Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD), a session-based protocol that travels over the GSM signaling channel to query information and trigger services.
In South Africa, it will use Instant EFT by OZOW, a payment method that allows line shoppers to access internet banking to make an Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) that gets instantly verified.
And in Kenya, Ebanx will sample M-Pesa, a mobile banking service that lets users store and transfer money.
