Welcome to one-click payments in Nigeria

Paga exists to solve two problems a) make it easy to pay and get paid and b) deliver financial services to the mass market. We continue to innovate to deliver customer centric solutions to these problems in a way that addresses the mass market, not just the upper echelon of society.

We see our work as building the base payments and financial services infrastructure that others can leverage to deliver their services. One of our innovations is our Paga Connect APIs.

Paga Connect takes payments in Nigeria to another level by introducing one-click payments.

With Paga Connect any 3rd party developer or company can implement one-click payments in their application without needing to worry about the core payments infrastructure. Paga Connect is an O-Auth 2.0 implementation, so if you can integrate Facebook for Login, you can integrate Paga Connect. It is that simple!

The benefit of Paga Connect is simple — with this integration you have access to ALL Nigerians, banked or unbanked, to pay online with one-click.

There are numerous use cases for 3rd parties to leverage Paga Connect. One that really excites me is online or mobile gaming. The current model for many game developers is to leverage airtime top-ups. The challenge there is the mobile networks take 70% of your revenue and you get 30%. When you are charging N50-N200 per game this makes the business model very difficult. Paga is changing that game.

Paga is flipping the Telco driven digital goods business model on its head and will only charge 30% for micro-payments and give digital goods developers the lion share of their earnings.

This week, ChopUp, a leading mobile gaming company in Nigeria (disclosure, I have a personal investment in ChopUp), is launching Africa’s first mobile eSports platform giving players opportunity to win cash prizes daily through skill-based daily tournaments in their games. This would not only provide entertainment for players but also provide them opportunity to win cash prizes on a daily basis. The first game is Monkey Post Street Soccer, which brings back childhood memories — just yesterday I spotted 3 street soccer games in my neighbourhood.

ChopUp is using Paga Connect. All gamers us a Paga wallet (create one at www.mypaga.com or *242# or Paga Android App), fund their wallets at any Paga agent, via bank transfer directly into their Paga wallet, or use their cards. Gamers then connect their Paga wallets to Monkey Post Street Soccer. Every time you wish to pay for a new day or purchase something in-app you simply press pay - there is no need to re-enter any details again. Your in game experience is seamless.

We also have companies such as MultiChoice (DStv & GOtv), Solo, and PayU using Paga Connect already. There is a cloud B2B company also leveraging Paga Connect for making payments, which is another great way to use our infrastructure…more to come on that soon I hope. I am quite excited about the possibilities with Paga Connect and encourage developers who are interested to leverage it! The Paga Connect APIs are out there and available, do let us know so we can help in any way possible on your journey!