Flutterwave, a payment technology company said that merchants on its platform can now receive their money as soon as customers check out using the Flutterwave checkout.
Nigerian merchants’s adoption of electronic payment system have gained traction going by a recent Fact Sheet released by the Nigerian Inter-bank Settlement System (NIBSS). The data showed that as at March 2019 the total number of Point of Sales (POS) registered were 270,111 while then total number connected and deployed was 221,058.
Nevertheless, experts have said that Nigeria is only doing less than 10 percent of the market potential in electronic payment. The reason is simple, retailers who are supposed to be the major drivers of growth may be taking more POS machines but they are not putting them to good use.
Top on the list of concerns for retailers is the persistent delay in electronic payment settlement. The existing settlement system requires that retailers get money from transactions with customers the next day, otherwise known as T+ or Transaction Day+1. Some retailers even say that settlement could take up to four or five days, especially during holiday periods.
Unified Payment had attempted to solve the problem in July
2018 with the UP Hourly Settlement Service (UP-HSS). The UP product ensures that retailers get their monies on an hourly basis in addition with full settlement report that aids them in reconciling daily sales. However with this announcement, Flutterwave has become the first company to offer instant settlement to merchants.
Merchants on Flutterwave receive their funds via Rave. Rave’s digital POS made its debut at the Jollof Festival in Lagos, Nigeria as the official payment technology partner of the festival.
Apart from the convenience of direct bank payment, on the Rave dashboard, merchants can monitor and manage their business.
“You don’t have to change any setting right now because you’ll be notified in your dashboard as soon as Instant Settlement is available to you, so you can choose whether or not to enable it. Instant Settlement will be enabled for all new merchants by default, although we still reserve the right to accept or decline Instant Settlement for any merchant,” the company noted in a statement.
It will be recalled that Flutterwave had in July partnered with Chinese-based global payment firm Alipay to offer digital payments between Africa and China. The company has also collaborated with Visa to launch Getbarter a consumer payment product for Africa.
