Flutterwave: A Runaway Payments Solutions Success Story - Connecting Africa to the Global Economy


Before 2016, African businesses faced hard times to accept payments from visitors, and international tech heavyweights like Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc had difficulties to accept local payments from African customers. This has changed since [url =https://flutterwave.com/ng/] Flutterwave[/url] entered the scene. It was founded in 2016 by a team of ex-bankers, entrepreneurs and engineers in response to this gap in the payments industry in Africa.
As a payment technology company, the main focus of Flutterwave is on helping banks and businesses provide seamless and secure payment experiences for their customers. The headquarters is in San Francisco (to leverage on Silicon Valley ) with offices in Lagos, Nairobi, Accra, and Johannesburg.
Achievements
According to the company’s website, Flutterwave currently has more than 50 bank partners, with over $2.6b payments processed in more than 100m transactions. More than 1200 developers build on Flutterwave. This is remarkable by all standards, especially for an African company.

One of the co-founders, 28-year-old Nigerian entrepreneur, Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, who also co-founded Andela, served as the pioneer CEO. He was reported by CNN, as saying that he “wants Silicon Valley to fund a future where Africa is included”, and people and businesses connect with the global economy. As at the time Aboyeji stepped down as CEO last year, and handed over to his co-founder, Olugbenga Agboola, Flutterwave has completed its Series A Extension round of financing, and this has taken its total raised funding from inception to date to more than US$20 million. This shows investors’ confidence in the performance of the company.
In their 2018 review, Flutterwave announced that they saw a 550% growth in the customer base of Flutterwave for Business (Rave), which is now 26,000 strong. This was made possible by partnerships with existing customers, retaining their key partnerships within the financial industry, enterprise customers like Uber, Arik Air, Booking.com and Flywire, and as they welcomed new customers like DusuPay (Uganda), BroadPay (Zambia) and PennySmart (Ghana). The revamped Barter (Flutterwave for Customers) now boasts of over 30,000 customers.
Their terrific run of achievements in 2018 culminated in the Best Payments Company award at the Ghana eCommerce Awards ceremony.

Payment Solutions
What makes Flutterwave thick? With its payment technology solution, consumers can pay for things in their local currency, while the company takes care of integrating banks and payment-service providers into its platform, and this relieves businesses of the expense and burden.
The company’s award-winning payments infrastructure which is accessible via USSD, Mobile, Point of Sale and Web channels enables banks, payments companies, and businesses to do much more. The numbers from the 2018 review by the company attest to the massive adoption of these infrastructures by merchants and customers. There is no sign that the upward growth experienced by the company will abet anytime soon.

The payment solutions are listed below.
● Rave (Flutterwave for Business) – an easy way to accept any payment method from customers and make payments, around the world online or in-store. With many positive testimonies from notable local businesses in Nigeria and beyond, signing up for rave opens up businesses to more opportunities by letting them accept a range of payment methods (card, bank account, and mobile wallet payments) from customers around the world, in person in physical stores or through app/website or on social media.

● Moneywave – used to make payments to anyone around the world. It is a payment system that allows users to securely charge cards and pays accounts. It is basically an API suite that allows connection of disparate payment sources, an omnichannel platform for payments across Africa.
● Barter (Flutterwave for Consumers) – used to issue and manage virtual and physical cards for retail, loyalty and expense management.

Partnerships
To accelerate its activities in its area of focus, Flutterwave has gone into various partnerships. The following partnerships are meant to address the listed issues:
1. Flywire + Flutterwave – this solution integration aims to streamline payment transactions for Nigerian students, patients, and businesses to facilitate payment of foreign school fees and medical bills in Naira.
2. Shopify + Flutterwave – this integration makes selling online easier. It helps African businesses scale globally by integrating Rave into their Shopify store.
3. Alipay + Flutterwave - this gives all Flutterwave merchants access to over 1 billion Alipay users, capturing payments activity around the estimated $200 billion in China-Africa trade. Alipay is now an additional option, to card, Barter, Mobile Money and other payment channels on the Rave checkout modal.
4. PayAttitude + Flutterwave – this only requires a customer’s phone number for a successful payment to occur, though the customer needs to be PayAttitude customer or get it first to be able to use this payment method.
5. Flutterwave + Afropolitan Group – this partnership is aimed at bridging the gap between Africa & the diaspora through entertainment & ticketing.

Developers
Flutterwave touts herself as the Google of all things Payment, with a leading community of engineers who develop the next standard of payment technology in the industry. They provide everything needed to build reliable and secure payment experiences. They make their libraries, plugins, and SDKs available so others can easily integrate and start collecting payments in minutes.

Closing Thoughts
Before this research, I knew very little about Flutterwave. In comparison to others in their space, they are heavyweights in their rights. I’m amazed at their dedication to building payments infrastructure to connect Africa to the global economy, and all that they have achieved in just a few short years. They are truly making it easier for Africans to build global businesses that can make and accept payment, anywhere from across Africa to the global economy. They have converted me and my business into customers for all their products. I am now following the relevant social media handles including that of the past and current CEOs. But more importantly, I am now their unofficial evangelist. You will be sure I will convert many into the Flutterwave way. Who knows, you the reader might just be one of them.

Image credits: Flutterwave Inc

I got debited for 2,100 by these guys and I didn't buy anything! I didn't even know of their existence until this debit alert. Scam!!!

ladgentle:
I got debited for 2,100 by these guys and I didn't buy anything! I didn't even know of their existence until this debit alert. Scam!!!

You should write to the merchant instead of calling them a scam. To me, I've always had a good experience with their payment gateway, good to see the company was founded by young chaps. I'm happy for you guys

ladgentle:
I got debited for 2,100 by these guys and I didn't buy anything! I didn't even know of their existence until this debit alert. Scam!!!

This is 2020. Contact your bank.