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Flutterwave partners Visa to launch payment solution for Africa

17 Jan 2019, 02:03 pm
Financial Nigeria
Flutterwave partners Visa to launch payment solution for Africa

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GetBarter is designed to facilitate personal and small merchant payments within and across African countries.

Olugbenga Agboola, CEO, Flutterwave. Picture source: Techpoint.africa

Flutterwave, a Nigerian fintech startup, has partnered with Visa, an American multinational financial services corporation, to launch GetBarter, a consumer payment solution for Africa. Under the terms of the partnership, existing Visa cardholders will be able to send and receive funds on GetBarter, according to a statement released on Thursday by Flutterwave.

The app-based service also allows non-cardholders to create virtual Visa cards that can link to the app. According to Flutterwave, GetBarter is designed to facilitate personal and small merchant payments within and across African countries. The app allows Flutterwave, which has scaled as a payment gateway for big companies through its Rave product, to pivot to African consumers and traders.

“Rave is B2B (business-to-business), this is more B2B2C (business-to-business-to-consumers) since we’re reaching the consumers of our customers,” said Olugbenga Agboola, CEO of Flutterwave. “The target market includes everyone who has a payment need in Africa. The entire customer base of M-Pesa, the entire bank customer base of Nigeria and mobile money and bank customers in Ghana – pretty much the entire continent.”

Flutterwave and Visa will focus on building a GetBarter user-base across mobile money and bank clients in Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa, with plans to grow across the continent and reach the financially excluded.

“In phase one, we will pursue those who are banked,” Agboola told TechCrunch in an interview. “And in phase two, we’ll continue toward those who are unbanked to enable them use agents to work with GetBarter.”

He added that revenue will be generated through fees from financial institutions on cards created and on fees per transaction. In Nigeria, a GetBarter payment charge will cost about N40, or an equivalent of 11 cents.

Founded in 2016, Flutterwave has positioned itself as a global B2B payments solutions platform for companies in Africa and abroad. Its existing customers include Uber, Facebook, Bookinng.com and Jumia.com.


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