Nigeria’s mobile payments service Paga has officially launched its business focused solution dubbed Paga for Business aiming at allowing small and large businesses receive mobile payments from its customers mobile phones or online.
Businesses can also send cash to mobile phone numbers or bank account and can also buy airtime for any mobile phone number in real-time.
According to Founder & Paga CEO, Tayo Oviosu: “As is our approach at Paga, we have created a suite of offerings by listening to our customers. To date over 3,000 businesses have already signed up for our business offerings. From global brands such as Emirates Airlines who use Paga’s payment gateway to accept payments from customers purchasing a plane ticket with a debit card or Paga account, to local businesses such as FoodPro who use Paga to disburse payments to staff at their cashew processing facility in Ilorin. We will continue to build on our current offering and expect to announce additional products to our suite soon.”
Paga for Business has Paga e-Pay, an online payment gateway and Paga Bulk Pay, a web-based, real-time payment solution. The e-Pay is a free online gateway that allows merchants to view their transactions in real-time and allows merchants to accept payments from customers with a Paga account, MasterCard, Visa, or Verve.
Paga’s second product, Paga Bulk Pay, allows merchants to send cash or airtime to a group of recipients to their bank accounts or mobile phones anywhere in the country.
Launched in 2009, Paga believes that mobile phones can be leveraged to bring financial services to all Africans and the firm has been striving to use “appropriate technology” to serve local markets at relatively low costs. Paga works on SMS enabled phone and on all mobile networks in the country unlike Kenya’s M-PESA which is tied to Safaricom.
Paga for Business is not relatively new as the firm has been running Paga Merchant Services which allows businesses to collect payment from customers using mobile phones or bank accounts over a Paga e-widget which is integrated on the website.
