Kenya’s Tanda, a fintech company has partnered with Twiga Foods to enable over 140,000 Twiga vendors become one stop shop for digital and financial services such as airtime, utilities, internet, banking and mobile money.
This comes a few months after Tanda launched the Tanda I/O, a new platform for developers to embed digital and financial services on their applications.
The API allows any digital platform to plug into Tanda’s banking & payments API to enable seamless integration of financial services into a traditionally non-financial platform. All a partner needs is to sign up, test the API and within a short time they can be fully integrated.
According to Tanda CEO, Geoff Mulei, “Tanda API offers the widest variety of financial services in the market which traditionally would have only been possible through several costly integrations. This coupled with our competitive commission rates, flexible use cases and a partner success process is guaranteed to deliver an unmatched experience for your customers,” Mulei said.
“Through Tanda I/O partners can sell all popular airtime and utility services, process bank and mobile money payments and issue physical and virtual cards to their customers.”
According Philip Moturi, Head of Digital Services at Twiga, embedded payments are important to Twiga to provide their vendors an additional Revenue and to help them save on costs for the utilities such as Electricity and airtime that they consume themselves.
“We were motivated to choose Tanda due to their service uptime and variety of product offerings. Tanda is a one-stop-shop that’s reliable. Tanda’s geographical spread gives us the ability to quickly scale to other countries and regions with minimal effort,” said Moturi.
“Additionally, with the other services that Twiga hasn’t yet tapped into gives us the opportunity to seamlessly expand our product offering. Equally as important is that it helps to drive traffic to our twiga.shop app – repeat usage of our app multiple times in a single day by a single vendor,” added Moturi.
Tanda is also working to support Twiga’s pan-African expansion strategy starting with East Africa. Seeing the demand for over the counter financial services growing exponentially in the recent past especially in cash intensive economies across Africa, Tanda is proud to be working with Twiga to fill this critical gap.
These services are now available as add-ons on the Soko Yetu platform, an innovative e-commerce platform that allows Twiga’s vendors to access products from various suppliers. The integration is poised to boost Twiga Foods’ vendors’ earnings and improved access for their customers while growing Tanda’s reach and utility. Tanda IO is planning an entry into Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania between Q1 and Q3 2022.