SA Start-Up Lipa Payments Details Its Plans To Further Expand Into South Africa And Nigeria
SA Start-Up Lipa Payments Details Its Plans To Further Expand Into South Africa And Nigeria. South African based startup Lipa Payments has announced its plans of expanding further into South Africa and Nigeria. The company announced this as they got a R10 million funding from Empowerment Capital’s Imvelo Ventures.
Lipa Payments plans to roll-out their Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution across South Africa and Nigeria in 2022. The company was founded by Thando Hlongwane and Roger Bukuru in 2019, the company has secured a R10 million investment from Empowerment Capital’s Imvelo Ventures, which is backed by Capitec Bank.
“We see tech as a scalable tool to solve everyday challenges. Lipa Payments solves two. First, we give small-scale merchants low-cost technology to accept digital payments at the point of sale and secondly, we allow buyers of goods and services to pay digitally without having to worry about cash or network coverage,” said CEO and Co-Founder of Lipa Payments, Thando Hlongwane in a statement.
“We have always wanted to solve the problems that informal sector merchants face. It’s been a journey of finding the solution to the question: ‘How can we bring them into a digital payments space,” Hlongwane added. According to Lipa Payments, the StatsSA’s Q4 2020 Quarterly Labour Force Survey shows that around 2.5 million South Africans are part of the informal economy (non-agricultural) and the number of people in informal employment has increased since 2013. Whether selling goods and services from a taxi rank, a spaza shop or a dirt road in a rural village, Lipa’s digital solution for merchants of the informal economy allows them to be financially included in the digital economy of the future.
“Informal sector merchants have traditionally relied on customers having cash on hand to transact, but Lipa Payments is changing that. There are obvious constraints to trading with cash and it is only getting more difficult in a digital, cashless global economy,” said Roger Bukuru, Co-CEO and co-founder of Lipa Payments in a statement.
