PAGA teams with LISNR to provide Ultrasonic Authentication for Contactless Payments around Africa
Paga Group, a leading payment, and financial service company have inked a partnership with LISNR the global leader in proximity verification, to enable contactless ultrasonic authentication as it expands its recently launched merchant solution, Doroki across Africa.
The collaboration between Paga and LISNR is LISNR’s first major partnership within the Fintech space in Africa. The relationship between Paga and LISNR has evolved over the past couple of years as they both are innovative VISA partners as well as Endeavor portfolio companies. The synergies eventually led to a strategic partnership.
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LISNR’s ultrasonic proximity verification solution will be enabled across Paga’s ecosystem for consumers to pay merchants and send money to each other with ease. Today’s launch is following months of successful in-market tests where Paga experienced significant improvements in consumer experience, transaction time, security, and merchant onboarding.
About LISNR
LISNR’s ultrasonic ‘data-over-sound’ technology enables contactless proximity verification and authentication across commerce experiences for merchants, financial service providers, and mobility companies. Today, multiple Fortune 100 companies trust LISNR to power data transmission & authentication between devices. Founded in 2012, LISNR is located in Oakland, CA, and Cincinnati, OH. Major investors include Visa, Intel, Jump Capital, NTT DOCOMO Ventures, Mercury Fund, R/GA, and Synchrony Financial. To learn more about the LISNR technology visit: http://LISNR.com or email info@lisnr.com.
“We are excited to incorporate LISNR into the Paga and Doroki Apps. We are leveraging their technology for both person to business and person-to-person payments. This is exciting because people can now pay at a till without being very close to the cashier. It also enables us to offer more interesting non-payment use cases for merchants and consumers. Our partnership with LISNR will give us a strong advantage in attaining our goal of 120,000 merchants in the next two years by offering yet another easy, contactless, and seamless way to make payments and drive loyalty with their customers” – Tayo Oviosu, Founder & CEO, Paga Group.
As the African fintech revolution continues to grow at a fast rate, billions are being invested to try and tap into one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, one that overwhelmingly favors tech-enabled solutions.
Paga made the news recently with their partnership with Untapped Global. As they rapidly try to scale from 33,000 merchants to 120,000 merchants within the next 2 years, it’s imperative that they bring on partners that provide complementary solutions aligned with their overall objective of facilitating this ~4x growth.
“Paga is the household name for Fintechs in all of Nigeria and is one of the market leaders in all of Africa. We believe our contactless & secure proximity solution will enable a seamless authentication process across its growing user & merchant database. With our easy to implement solution and our proven savings for merchants, we’re well-positioned to help Paga in their goal of scaling to 120,000 merchants in two years.” – Eric Allen, CEO, LISNR
About Paga
Paga is a payments and financial services ecosystem for Africa. Our ecosystem is similar to that of Square and PayPal as we focus on helping both consumers and sellers pay, get paid, and access financial services. Our first market is Nigeria where we now have over 18 million unique users. Africa is massively underserved when it comes to payments and financial services. We believe that in today’s Africa, digital-only does not scale. Cash will not go away anytime soon and smartphone penetration is still low (Nigeria, as an example, is where the US was in smartphone penetration in 2010, and most business is conducted offline). Paga enables consumers to access and use money in the most convenient way for them, whether that is through a neighborhood store (agents) or via their mobile phone (smartphone or feature phone). We also enable sellers to sell more efficiently and access financing. Additionally, we open our APIs to third-party partners to enable endless possibilities for others to innovate.
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