Finserve is what Jack Ngare, Managing Director, describes as a giant startup. Giant in that, Finserve is a fully-owned subsidiary of Equity Group (not Equity Bank), who has quite the deep pockets and a startup because Equity’s deep pockets were not enough to make Finserve stay and as from today, Finserve is a standalone company.
Despite being a startup with only three years’ worth of operations to its name, Finserve prides itself in being the mother company to Equitel, a Kenyan MVNO that mostly targets mobile money and also being the power behind Equity Bank’s EazzyApp, a mobile banking app.
Evidently, Finserve has a strong relationship with payments and fintech in general, they describe themselves as “a fintech company with a vision to power the ambitions of people and organizations beyond boundaries”, therefore it did not come as a surprise when Mr Ngare announced that the company’s latest product is a payments gateway and API dubbed Jenga.
Jenga Payment Gateway
On the payments side, Jenga Payment Gateway will allow businesses to accept payments from various sources directly into their accounts. Mr Ngare says that the payment gateway will accept payments from 180 countries and will allow customers to checkout with payment providers such as Visa, Mastercard and AMEX as well as mobile money services like M-Pesa, Airtel Money, Equitel and even international digital wallets like Paypal, Alipay and WeChat Pay.
“You can accept payments from all those cards, all those channels in all those countries with Jenga Payment gateway,” said Jack Ngare as he made a presentation on the same. “Our mission is to offer cutting-edge solutions through collaboration and innovation,” he added.
Targetting this collaboration, Finserve also announced Jenga API. A set of APIs that would allow developers to integrate fintech services into their apps and platforms. The APIs include mobile money services across six African countries, loans and credit facilities and even utility payments.
There are already corporates using Jenga payments gateway and APIs. For instance, Kilimall’s check out platform is powered by Jenga as well as Jungle Nuts, a business that uses Jenga to pay its suppliers. “If you have APIs, you can digitize your entire business. With Jenga, we aim to prosper lives and connect today’s potential with tomorrow’s opportunities,” concluded Jack Ngare.
