Visa announced on Wednesday it is teaming up with pan-African fintech MFS Africa to help bring digital payments to more consumers and businesses throughout Africa. The duo reported that MFS Africa, which connects through one API more than 180 million mobile wallets on the continent, will distribute Visa payment credentials across multiple markets in Africa.
“This will allow mobile money users connected to the MFS Africa platform to generate an instant Visa virtual card with a 16-digit number and link it to their mobile money accounts to use for remittances and ecommerce transactions.”
Visa also revealed that MFS Africa will integrate Visa’s real-time push payments solution Visa Direct, to provide mobile money users on the MFS Africa platform. Dare Okoudjou, founder and CEO of MFS Africa, stated:
“In the past few years, we have been relentlessly focused on creating new digital pathways between mobile money users in Africa. Having reached significant scale, we are now turning our focus to connecting our network to the wider world, to unleash the wealth of opportunity that trade with Africa presents to the global economy. We have found in Visa an invaluable partner to support us in the next stage of our expansion. The reach of the Visa network is unparalleled, and we look forward to working with Visa to realise our vision of a world in which no one is limited in what they can achieve when it comes to payments.”
Jack Forestell, Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer of Visa, added:
“Africa is adopting a mobile-led, digital payments ecosystem and with Visa looking to accelerate the distribution of payment credentials and expand the acceptance space for digital payments, this partnership is an important one. MFS Africa will help us enable digital payment use cases at scale through their aggregation model.”
