Badala, Zimbabwe’s Mobile Payment Gateway set to Launch in South Africa

Badala helps online merchants to receive payments from the African market.

Badala, Zimbabwe’s mobile payment gateway that helps merchants to receive payments from 45 African countries and a potential of 550 million smart phone owners using direct mobile billing, is set to be officially launched in South Africa next year.

Badala allows a simple API gateway to merchant’s web or mobile app. With an easy to use dashboard and an intuitive design, the flow of money from the client’s mobile wallet like EcoCash to merchant’s bank account or into their hands cuts short loads of bureaucratic and hectic current processes of payments. They make the flow of payments easy and transparent with no hidden costs.

Badala, which is an e-commerce platform that enables mobile financial transactions to take place in the region, incorporates wallet services such as Ecocash (Zimbabwe), Tigo cash (Tanzania), Orange (West African countries) and banks such as Stanbic and Barclays.

Badala, Chief Marketing Officer, Emison Mashiri said that the services will be launched February 2018.

“We officially launched the services in Zimbabwe last year in October and today we have a total of 591 subscribers from Zimbabwe, South Africa, Zambia and Malawi. There are 350 from Zimbabwe, 125 from South Africa, 60 from Zambia and 56 from Malawi.

“In February, we intend to launch our services in Johannesburg, South Africa. Next year in March, the services will be launched in Zambia then in the last quarter it will be launched in Malawi,” said Mashiri.

Badala was founded by Mcwilton Chingwenengene in September last year and the co-founder is Tafadzwa Mhone. He launched the platform after a start-up called Authorpad where digital authors could sell and share their writings.

According to Mashiri, it was in that process that Chingwenengene discovered that it was not easy for the authors to receive their money because almost three-quarters of their customers were unbanked.