Almost seven years after launching, the online payment company has entered a fourth African market. Its ambition remains to make digital payments accessible to a larger number of people.
Paydunya, the Senegal-based online payment start-up, has recently started operations in Togo.
Already present in Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Benin, and Burkina Faso, Paydunya is coming to Togo with the ambition to “make digital payments accessible, regardless of the payment method used, regardless of the area and region, and regardless of the sector of activity, whether public or private.”
The payment aggregator maintains that it wants to provide "real added value" with secure solutions for receiving and making payments via mobile money (T-money, Flooz) and bank cards.
“We want to facilitate access to digital payments to all businesses regardless of their size or sector of activity and thus participate and contribute to the vast financial inclusion project in Togo,” Aziz Yérima, CEO of PayDunya told We are Tech. “Our launch in Togo is a response to the needs of our customers," intended to "provide them with accessible payment solutions,” he added.
A growing fintech ecosystem
In Togo, Paydunya joins a growing fintech ecosystem that has welcomed in recent years, young "promising" startups such as CinetPay, Semoa, and Gozem, the super App specialized in e-transport and e-logistics.
Paydunya, which reached 65,000 transactions per day in 2021, intends to take advantage of this Togolese environment that fosters digitalization and financial inclusion. Data from the BCEAO shows that over 72% of the Togolese population holds at least one account in a financial institution or a mobile money account.
Given the greater use of Mobile Money in Togo, since it was adopted in 2016, more Fintechs have been eyeing Togo. Wave, a mobile money solution - which Paydunya integrates into its range of solutions - is among them; it revealed plans to come to Lomé. Due to its competitive fee structure, the U.S. unicorn, whose operational base is in Dakar, will surely shake the Togolese mobile money transfer ecosystem (which is presently shared between Moov and Togocel), and aggregators like Paydunya could gain the most from this digitalization-driven disruption.
An idea born on campus
Paydunya’s founders, Aziz Yerima, Youma Fall, Honoré Hounwanou, and Christian Palouki, came up with the idea in 2014 while studying at the École Supérieure Multinationale des Télécommunications (ESMT), in Benin, Ivory Coast, Senegal, and Togo. They launched the fintech the following year.
In 2021, nearly 7 years later, the fintech claims to have processed more than 15 million transactions valued at CFA 110 billion. Its customer base is estimated at more than 1,200 B2B clients.
Fiacre E. Kakpo
