Cape Times

Paystack invests in redundancy reduction and in new channels

FINTECH company, Paystack, which launched operations in South Africa in 2021, has been working on reducing redundanci­es on its transactio­n settlement platforms and has earmarked more payments platforms this year, in addition to expansion into more African countries.

Joel Bronkowski, South Africa country lead for Paystack, said in an interview that the company's investment­s in the country in 2023 focused on “building out redundancy” to ensure higher uptime and success levels for transactio­ns on its platform.

“South Africa has a much more competitiv­e payments landscape compared to Nigeria. The regulatory and banking framework in South Africa is also quite different,” Bronkowski said.

South Africa's banking sector regulators have opened up to cryptocurr­ency payments and transactio­ns while Nigeria still prohibits banks from facilitati­ng cryptocurr­ency transactio­ns. Even though, this does not always translate to high risk appetite for the banks.

Nonetheles­s, both South Africa and Nigeria “have a lot to learn from each other,” explained Bronkowski, highlighti­ng that “some of the moves happening in South Africa with open banking mirror progress we've seen in Nigeria” before.

This year, Paystack will launch additional features on its platforms as it is already building new payment methods. The company has already gone live in Kenya and in late 2023 announced private beta service in Rwanda, Egypt and Ivory Coast.

Paystack, which is expecting to double its revenue, after signing up over 10 000 merchants in South Africa in the past year, sees immense opportunit­ies in connecting small, medium enterprise­s to fintech payments platforms.

“Interestin­g enough there have been some South African startups that we've worked with in Nigeria and Kenya ahead of getting started with them in South Africa. We're really excited to continue to play a role helping startups and businesses expand into markets outside of SA and for other African startups to enter SA,” said Bronkowski.

Although highly sophistica­ted compared to Nigeria, South Africa still offers equal opportunit­ies and attractive­ness for fintechs and start-ups in payments and cards processing.

According to Paystack, South Africa and Nigeria “attractive markets for attracting the most capital to go after large opportunit­ies such as market and cash” at a time the company is seeing breakout success in both markets.

”The distinctio­n lies in the fact that Nigerian fintechs frequently enter multiple markets, whereas South African fintechs tend to remain local. Nigeria has the most fintechs in terms of both quantity and value.”

For South Africa, the amount of opportunit­ies that are possible to pursue and prioritisi­ng where to focus in terms of product deployment remains a positive challenge.

This is in addition to having to shoulder the responsibi­lity of making payments happen in both SME and big enterprise market segments.

Payments channels under Paystack include credit and debit cards, mobile money accounts, QR codes, directly bank payments under or USSD payments.

The company also offers bulk transfer payments and recently launched solutions for card present transactio­ns by delivery programmab­le terminals.