Small Businesses can now accept Nigeria’s eNaira for transactions, says Flutterwave

Flutterwave, Africa’s leading payments technology company, today announced that it has added Nigeria’s eNaira as a payment option for merchants, a move that could help boost adoption of the digital currency.

eNaira is a digital currency issued and regulated by the Central Bank of Nigeria as a medium of exchange and store of value. It was launched on October 25, 2021 and is available to users with or without a bank account, as they only need to register and access the wallet via the eNaira mobile app.

To complete transactions on Flutterwave, users can either scan QR codes or generate one-time tokens using the app.

Flutterwave provides technology, infrastructure, and services to enable global businesses, payment service providers and Pan-African banks to accept and process payments on any channel (Web, Mobile, ATM & POS).

The fintech giant currently operates across Africa, Europe, North America, and other emerging markets by providing a suite of payment tools that enable over One million businesses accept payments from their customers anywhere in the world in over 150 currencies, including the Naira and eNaira.

Its merchants can enable the eNaira payment option on their dashboard for their customers to be able to use that method to pay for their services.

As this is an opt-in feature, Flutterwave also allows merchants to disable it, as they can do with any other payment method available to them in the dashboard.

Commenting on the new initiative, the company, in a blog post, said;

“We’re always looking for ways to simplify payments for businesses and their customers. One way to do this is to enable payment methods that our customers and their customers find useful. Our addition of the eNaira payment method is yet another effort to ensure that when businesses do the hard work of bringing customers, the choice of payment method will not be a challenge.”

Nigeria, the first African nation to launch a digital currency, is targeting 8 million users for the app launched in October. But adoption has been slow as lenders worry the app would compete with their online platforms and reduce fee revenue.

Flutterwave said that over 1 million merchants now accept eNaira payments from their customers.

“We… are confident that this number will grow further as we continue to innovate and expand,” Flutterwave said in a statement.

Nigeria aims to expand usage of its eNaira digital currency by attracting users without bank accounts after a first phase adoption saw 850,000 downloads by bank customers.

The west African country is battling to stabilise its weakening currency, curb rising inflation and boost growth after economic disruption from the COVID-19 pandemic.

This comes as the Foremost fintech unicorn secured a switching and processing license by the Central Bank in Nigeria. According to Flutterwave, “the new license will allow for faster transactions, improved payments experience, more products and improved security.”