Mobile payments company, Paga now has 5 million users

Paga, Nigeria’s leading mobile payments company, has just achieved a major milestone: it now has 5 million users

In a Medium post announcing this development, Tayo Oviosu, co-founder of Paga, stated the journey to this point wasn’t an easy one.

“It’s been a long journey, and success is still not guaranteed, but it has been incredibly fulfilling!,” he said.

Although launched in 2009, Paga, which leverages the ubiquity of the mobile phone to enable a cashless society and increase financial access to the unbanked, didn’t start real operations to the market until after it raised funds in a Series A funding round in 2012.

From that point on, the journey became a little smoother and adoption rate started growing.

At the time of the Series A, it had 125,000 users. In June 2015, users climbed to 3 million – it gained 2 million users in 14 months. And today, it now has 5 million users.

Much of its success has been attributed to its 10,000 agents, women and men who work tirelessly to process payments for millions of Nigerians.

These agents helped process US$1 billion in transactions from January 2012 – June 2015. The next 12 months, July 2015 – July 2016, over US$800 million was processed.

“I love our agents and always enjoy going out to the field and meeting them — they are making a difference in their communities and building valuable businesses for themselves,” Tayo said.

The company is also gearing up for another milestone. In the last quarter of this year, it hopes to have 1 million active users – at the moment, it has 900,000.

These milestones can sometimes get into one’s head and make one forget that “to whom much is given, much is expected.” Paga isn’t going to rest on its laurels.

The company will launch new products to help ease payments for its customers in the country. It will be delving into money transfers and other services in the nearest future.

“The ability to send money P2P and to pay businesses (online and offline) will be the major driver of our growth in this phase of our history. Our P2P story is only just beginning…,” Tayo added.

The company also plans to launch a major upgrade to its consumer offerings, and a major upgrade to our online payment gateway as it looks to service its users better.

For the uninitiated, Paga is an innovative, open, secure, and interoperable mobile payments platform that allows anyone with a mobile phone transact electronically.

With Paga, customers can send cash, purchase airtime credit, pay bills, and pay retailers, et al. Paga works on all phones, and on all networks.