Nigeria’s Paga acquires Ethiopian Software company Apposit; plans to enter Ethiopia, Mexico

Paga, a Nigerian mobile payments company, has acquired an Ethiopian software company, Apposit for an undisclosed amount.

This acquisition is part of its strategy to commence operations into Ethiopia later this year. Paga also intends to leverage the US incorporated Apposit to support its expansion into East Africa and Latin America.

Paga also announced that it would begin operations in Mexico this year.

Paga’s relationship with Apposit is not new; the company has always had an engineering team dedicated to Paga since 2009, led by Eric Chijioke, who is Paga’s Chief Technology Officer

Paga will retain Apposit’s CEO, Adam Abate, as the new CEO of Paga Ethiopia. Eric Chijioke will remain the Chief Technology Officer responsible for product development, Simon Solomon becoming the Lead Systems Architect, and Gideon Abate as the Head of Product Innovation. It will also retain the 63 man engineering team and tech capabilities. It intends to direct its boosted capabilities and total workforce of 530 to support expansion. Paga Ethiopia will go live when it gets a banking license to operate in the country.

In addition, Paga now owns Apposit’s other in-house technology products, Terra and Tangio.

Terra is a digital agricultural platform that provides products & tools to collect, manage and analyze data in agricultural value chains. The Terra platform harnesses the power of data to improve decision making in agriculture.

Tangio is a sales force automation platform for manufacturers and distributors of FMCG products. It provides companies the tools and intelligence to plan and execute their route to market strategies.

Paga’s CEO Tayo Oviosu had signified Paga’s intention to go global when it raised $10 million in 2018.

According to Oviosu in a discussion with Techcrunch, “The goal is straight-forward. We want Ethiopians to use the Paga wallet as their payment account. So it’s about digitizing cash transactions and driving financial services.”

“There are several very large countries around the world in Africa, Latin America, Asia where these [financial inclusion] problems still exist. So our strategy is not an African strategy…We want to go where these problems exist in a large way and build a global payments business,” said Oviosu