Paga now has 11 million unique users, according to this medium post by its founder, Tayo Oviosu. The digital payments company witnessed unprecedented growth throughout 2018 as they grew from 8 million to 9 million users in 141 days, 79 days to move from 9 million to 10 million users – and 37 days to hit 11 million from 10 million users.
“As we continue to build our ecosystem to create simple and easy financial access to everyone, we look forward to providing more services and products tailored to making life possible not only in Nigeria but globally… As we continue to grow our A+ team, we strive to grow this number to serving 1 billion customers globally,” the company said in a statement.
The company is also working on unveiling a cloud payroll business that maybe be announced anytime soon.
“Today, Paga is squarely tackling mobile payments and banking the unbanked/underbanked, and our sister company, a cloud payroll business, is launching soon. We set out on this journey to make it simple for people to access and use money. Our motivation is simple — we want to make life possible for everyone.” Paga founder, Tayo Oviosu announced.
See Also: TechPreneur Of The Week: The Inspiring Journey Of Paga Founder, Tayo Oviosu
Adding a Nigeria-based Engineering Team.
Since launching in 2012, Paga have been handling its engineering and technical operations in Ethiopia – in partnership with Apposit, who has shares in Paga – with the country based 25-person team. In September, Techpoint reached out to the company regarding the Engineering team and they revealed that they will be getting a Nigerian base for the engineering team.
As per Tayo Oviosu’s medium post, “I am excited to announce that Bayo Puddicombe and Zubair Abubakar, co-founders of ChopUp, along with Daniel Micah have joined Paga’s Product Development team as our first Nigerian based engineers (we have other Nigerian engineers on the team but not based in Lagos).”
Bayo will be leading Digital Financial Services team while Zubair will head the Developer API and Developer Community team who will both report to Paga’s Chief Product Officer, Eric Chijioke.
The new team was trained in Ethiopia, Daniel Oparison, Head, Brand Strategy & Customer Experience, confirmed.
Paga’s Long Term Competition with Paypal, Alipay and M-Pesa
Three months ago, the company secured $10 million in funding led by the Global Innovation Fund, aiming to expand into the Global market. Paga CEO, told TechCrunch at Disrupt San Francisco that, its releasing its payments product in Ethiopia, Mexico, and the Philippines.
“We are not only in a position to compete with them, we’re going beyond them,” he said of Safaricom’s M-Pesa. “Our goal is to build a global payment ecosystem across many emerging markets.”
The company has served 11 million customers and created over 10,000 jobs through its 17,000 agents who hire staff to run their stores since it commenced operations since 2012.
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