Touch And Pay To Make Continental Expansion For Cashless Implementation in Africa
Touch and Pay, Nigerian fintech, has revealed its intentions to expand its services to other African nations, a plan that will be executed with the Three Million US dollars (US$3 million) seed funding it recently raised.
Touch and Pay was founded in 2019, and it has since developed a system based on near-field communication (NFC) as a payment tool that can be accessed anytime anywhere. according to Michael Oluwole, Co-founder of the fintech, T&P is in the process of creating a totally cashless community.
Addressing their plans to expand, Michael stated, “Today we are in four states in Nigeria – Lagos, Ogun, Oyo, and Kano. We plan to roll out to Ghana and Senegal.”
While explaining the payment situation in Africa, Micheal said “Today there are two types of transactions in Africa, firstly macro ones like buying a car or house, or payment of tuition, These transactions have been digitised and are processed electronically. But the other type of transaction is micro-transactions, like payment of transportation fares, getting snacks or a cup of coffee, or buying groceries. These are all cash-based and they account for 70 per cent of all daily transactions in Nigeria today.”
Although there are a lot of digital payment platforms in Nigeria, the majority of Nigerians possess bank accounts, yet, people still have to make cash withdrawals to perform some microtransactions in society.
Claiming that there are a lot of financial data unaccounted for, Michael further said, “No financial inclusion is achieved, there is no data on these transactions, and no credit-scoring because all the transactions are cash or manual.”
The co-founder endeavoured to explain Touch and Pay’s vision of payment and financial services in West Africa, by using East Africa’s M-PESA as a yardstick of its services.
He said, “We operate in a market for the lower bottom of the pyramid. Getting them to adopt is always very slow, but once we do we achieve stickiness. We started with the payment of bus fares in 2020, and now we help 350,000 people pay for bus fares daily in Nigeria, with over 2.3 million users. We recently started digitising micro merchant payments.”
The digital payment platform had participated in the 2022 batch of the Y combinator accelerator based in Silicon Valley, and also raised a pre-seed round of Three Million US dollars (US$3 million).
T&P secures revenue by charging a percentage on processed transactions. Currently, it can boast of Two Hundred and Seventy Thousand US dollars (US$270,000) monthly.