Interview with PayQin

 

The “dream” – how it all started

More than 80% of people in emerging countries don’t have access to financial services. Today most of those people would like to buy products online on a website like Amazon, eBay – if you don’t have a debit card this is just not possible.

They have a smartphone, they use the internet and they have cash. Also, SMEs in emerging countries are not able to receive online payments and hence not able to scale their business digitally.

We decided to build PayQin, a payment platform for the unbanked and bring these people into the global e-commerce.

 

Product / Area of focus – to best represents PayQin’s work

PayQin is an e-wallet app that comes with a built-in virtual debit card which can be used to buy everywhere Visa and Mastercard are accepted.

We allow users to top up the wallet with the balance available in their prepaid mobile phone. We also provide a suite of tools for businesses to accept payments online & offline.

Payment API for online stores, QR code payment, Billing system, Payment link.

 

 

Challenges in the geographical areas of influence

From the beginning, we wanted to provide a physical debit card to our users in Ivory Coast and Cameroun. We faced a challenge during the development of the product.

In these two countries, most people do not have an address – which means that we couldn’t ship the physical cards to our users as we would for US or EU based users.

This forced us to review our strategy and opt for a virtual card that can be displayed in a smartphone with instant delivery because everything is done in real time.

It helped us to reach even more people and to fight financial exclusion more effectively.

 

Successes

Today we have almost 10K people using PayQin for local and international payments.

We provide more than 1500 virtual debit cards and partner with local businesses to accepts their payments through PayQin.

 

About the Nordic effort

The project has been selected by Swedbank to be part of their first Fintech acceleration program in partnership with Startup Wise Guys. We received support and investment in order to build the product.

 

The Financial Inclusion Summit takes place in Oslo, Norway, on 28 March 2019. To find out more or request an invitation, visit: https://financial-inclusion.com/#register

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