Following the surge in mobile money use in Africa, OzinboPay, a new mobile payment gateway founded late last year, has vowed to enable merchants within West Africa receive and make online and offline payments via the mobile phone, a feature many of the continent’s payment platforms lack.
To make this happen, OzinboPay has partnered with top mobile money operators in West Africa including Airtel Money Ghana, Tigo Cash Ghana and MTN Mobile Money Ghana.
OzinboPay said its goal is to empower merchants and businesses, receive payment both online and offline in all the Western African countries by 2014.
The payment platform allows sellers and merchants to accept payments using mobile money. Plans are underway to include credit cards. Buyers can make payments using mobile money, track all your payments, request and receive payment from other OzinboPay members.
“Traders couldn’t receive and account for mobile money which was just mobile transfer system then. There were no documents, mobile payments favoured person to person money transfer alone,” Sam Opoku of OzinboPay said.
OzinboPay says, it afterwards verifies all merchants to protect users from fraudulent sales. The users also get receipts immediately for all payments.
“We wanted to find a suitable means for customers to pay online and clients to receive payments online lead to development of OzinboPay.
Sam Paapa Opoku a Co-Founder with OzinboPay told HumanIPO: “At Jetnor, we were offering an online application service to a major university in Ghana but getting payments directly was a hurdle. We had to still visit a bank to make payment and then use the receipt from the bank to complete payment online – this was cumbersome; but many firms still do it as not all merchants accept mobile payments.”
Global Mobile Money Adoption survey indicates there were more than 60 million mobile money users as of June 2011, who used the service to pay bills, transfer money from person to person, buy airtime and and do bulk payments or as a store value.
It is this time, according to Opoku, that mobile money was hyped by all the providers of mobile money (MTN, Tigo and Airtel). He adds this is where the work on mobile money began and nFortics focused on mobile payment and financial services.
nFortics, the company that owns OzinboPay, was initially founded in United Kingdom as a Credit Referencing Bureau (CRB) solutions provider for its sister company, Jetnor.
