Nigerian payments startup Paystack has raised $1.3 million in funding from international angel investors, which will assist the fintech company refine its online platform and reduce the time for doing business between enterprises and their customers. Paystack CEO, Shola Akinlade, said the money will be allocated between the company’s engineering, marketing, and research and development departments.
“The financial assistance that we have acquired today from our investors, together with training we have received from Y Combinator, will enable us to make African businesses work better with online payment systems,” he added.
Paystack has gotten backing from investors such as Blue Rinc Capital, Comcast Ventures, KIBS-CFY Partners, Pave Investments, M&S Partners, Spark, and Tencent among others, in addition to being a graduate of the Y Combinator acceleration program.
Akinlade says that the company arose out of the need to provide enterprises and their customers with less time to conduct transactions.
He says that research helped his team establish why African enterprises often shun online payments. Among the reasons was that it takes too much time to make online payments. To address this issue, Paystack developed an infrastructure that allows enterprises to receive online payments from their customers within the first half hour of a transaction.
Christian Ebersol, an investor with Comcast Ventures said that they are proud to back Paystack because its the platform is helping facilitate payment between enterprises and their customers in a short amount of time.
According to TechCrunch, Paystack simplifies the trading process between enterprises and their customers, by reducing the time required to make web and mobile applications payments, either through credit or debit cards, or money remittance services.
By doing this, Akinlade says that his team will be able to tap into and satisfy the African business market, which is currently transacting online in various ways.
Nigeria’s Conducive Business Environment
While much of the country still conducts transactions in cash, there has been a recent upsurge in online payments according to the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).
These economic activities in turn help to integrate Nigeria into the global community, but the challenge for the CBN is ensuring that all online payment systems measure up to international standards.
