Notes for video:
International businesses have the volume and and are looking for a minimum level of certainty and risk management when it comes to acquiring across the continent. Most non-African merchants and payment providers expect African acquiring and payments to be like more developed markets, but it’s not.
It is imperative that the key payment methods of each territory need to be supported. The further out one goes to less developed countries, the higher need for smoothing out the experience for multinational merchants.
Card acquiring can be done from abroad, but the conversion rates will be a lot lower. Many international issuing banks are blocking acquiring by African banks, and acquiring banks block transactions involving African issued cards.
There seems to be few companies offering the “single API” and “all payment methods with local conditions taken care of”.
This job will become easier over time as a result of interoperability initiatives like Hover, Mojaloop, Mowali and the mobile payment aggregators like MFS. But they are all in the embryo stages and will need a lot of completion and maturing.
Some of the local payment platforms going multiregional have been experiencing quality delivery problems as a consequence of their scaling.
It is imperative that we at APS continue to deliver smooth operations and service delivery to our multinational, target market whilst taking care of the inconsistencies and anomalies of the African market.
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