Visa Partners Flocash to Promote Digital Capabilities for African SMEs
Visa, the world’s leading digital payments company, announced today that it is partnering with Flocash, Africa’s fastest-growing fintech 2022, to promote digital capabilities for African SMEs through digital payments, supplier solutions, and access to financial services.
The first step in this collaboration is the launch of Flostore, powered by a Visa digital wallet and the Flocash pan-African payment platform. It will assist small businesses in accepting digital payments, managing supplies, and accessing financial services across Africa.
Flostore, Flocash, and Visa will also collaborate to embed financing in payments and bring the element of analytics, bookkeeping, and reconciliation for small businesses via Visa’s dynamic underwriting capabilities, which include buying, now pay later structures.
Commenting on the partnership deal, Corine Mbiaketcha, Vice President and General Manager for East Africa at Visa, said, “Flocash has grown significantly as a travel payments processor over the last few years, and we are thrilled to partner with them to build innovative payments solutions that reduce friction in commerce for merchants in Africa.”
“Visa is committed to expanding the digitization of payments across Africa. With partners like Flocash, our goal is to enable African businesses to access our payments ecosystem and technologies to enable them to innovatively and efficiently serve their customers. This partnership with Flocash, as well as the launch of Flostore, are an important step towards achieving this goal.” Mbiaketcha added.
Small businesses can use Flostore’s ‘Tap2phone’ capabilities to convert their existing mobile devices into payment acceptance terminals. ‘Tap2phone’ is a necessary and cost-effective mechanism for developing digital payment infrastructure in developing markets. At the same time, CyberSource Payment Gateway technology incorporates all security protocols to ensure customers’ safety when transacting online. It is intended to increase fraud protection, reduce cardholder friction, and increase sales completion, resulting in a better experience for all parties involved. This makes it easier for merchants and issuers to detect and avoid fraud.
SMEs can use their digital footprint to tap into traditional and alternative funding sources to expand commerce, while banks reduce operating costs as their revenue base grows. In addition, digitizing the lending process enables banks to streamline inefficient SME lending processes and provide value to their customers. According to Visa’s annual outlook survey for 2022, 82 percent of small and micro businesses prefer digital payment options.
Sirak Mussie, Managing Director of Flocash, said, “Visa is a great partner to scale Flocash’s pan-African payment platform and develop this critical area of African commerce that can offer enormous continent-wide economic development opportunities.”
According to the IFC report, partnerships like this will go a long way toward closing Africa’s SMEs’ current financing gap of more than $136 billion. In addition, a digitized SME sector will unlock the vast market potential of the African continent, which is being driven by rapid population growth.