Nigeria Fintech startup, Flutterwave has finalised its expansion to Uganda. According to reports, Flutterwave had a team in Uganda that was carrying out the integration with the local payments service providers (PSPs) which includes telecoms, banks, and others.
This was confirmed by Omosalewa Adeyemi – who handles partnerships for Flutterwave from their San Francisco office.
What this expansion means is that businesses that have clients in Uganda can be able to receive payments using Flutterwave’s system.
At the same time, businesses in Uganda with operations in markets which Flutterwave supports will be able to receive payments from these clients.
“So what that means is that if there is a business in Nigeria that determines that they have customers in South Africa and Uganda, we want them to be able to use the Flutterwave platform to accept payment in all those countries,” Omosalewa said.
Although some of Flutterwave’s services – like card payment processing – are available in almost all African countries, according to Omosalewa, this expansion makes Uganda just the latest country where they have all their services localized. That’s after Kenya, Ghana, and Nigeria.
She says this is because “unlike other parts of the world, Africa is different.” Partly due to its diversity. For example, while as one can use card payments across Europe and the US, that’s not the case for Africa. Each country has its own way of accepting payments.
As part of the expansion, the startup is also recruiting “agents” that it will leverage to onboard merchants. And Omosalewa confirmed that they are in conversations with several potential partners.
Founded in 2015, Flutterwave aims to “build a unified digital payments infrastructure for the African continent.” Last year, they raised an over $10 Million Series A from Greycroft, Green Visor and Omidyar Foundation.
It currently has clients in form of Uber – whom it processes payments from drivers in Africa for – as well as pay those very drivers for. The other one is Transferwise.
