Kenya’s Flocash, which also offers its services across Africa, has partnered with Visa to offer digital payment capabilities for SMEs in the continent.
The collaboration has also seen the launch of Flostore. The product is powered by Visa digital wallet, and alongside Flocash payment platform, Flostore will see merchants, and other small businesses, accept digital payments while managing supplies and accessing additional financial services.
The two partners also have other products and services following the collaboration. Specifically, Visa and Flocash will work together to embed financing in payments, while offering extra features such as analytics, bookkeeping, and reconciliation for SMEs. These functions will leverage Visa’s dynamic underwriting capabilities, which further include ‘buy now pay later’ models.
Flocash prides itself on its Tap2phone features. This means that any merchant can turn their phone into a payment acceptance terminal. It is a cheap mechanism for SMEs that are trying to grow, especially in growing economies.
SMEs account for 90% of all businesses in Africa but have an annual financing gap of over US $136 billion according to IFC.
Quotes
“Visa is committed to expanding the digitization of payments across Africa. With partners like Flocash, our goal is to enable African businesses to access our payments ecosystem and technologies to enable them to innovatively and efficiently serve their customers. This partnership with Flocash, as well as the launch of Flostore, are an important step towards achieving this goal,” said Corine Mbiaketcha, Vice President and General Manager for East Africa at Visa.
“Visa is a great partner to scale Flocash’s pan-African payment platform and develop this critical area of African commerce that can offer enormous continent-wide economic development opportunities,” said Sirak Mussie, Managing Director of Flocash.
