By Adedapo Adesanya
Paga Group, a leading payment and financial service company, has inked a partnership with LISNR, the global leader in proximity verification, to enable contactless ultrasonic authentication as it expands its recently launched merchant solution, Doroki across Africa.
The collaboration between Paga and LISNR is the latter’s first major partnership within the Fintech space on the continent.
The relationship between Paga and LISNR has evolved over the past couple of years as they both are innovative VISA partners as well as Endeavor portfolio companies.
According to the company, the synergies eventually led to a strategic partnership.
LISNR’s ultrasonic proximity verification solution will be enabled across Paga’s ecosystem for consumers to pay merchants and send money to each other with ease.
The launch is following months of successful in-market tests where Paga experienced significant improvements in consumer experience, transaction time, security and merchant onboarding.
Speaking on this, Mr Tayo Oviosu, founder & CEO, Paga Group, stated that, “We are excited to incorporate LISNR into the Paga and Doroki Apps. We are leveraging their technology for both person-to-business and person to person payments.
“This is exciting because people can now pay at a till without being very close to the cashier. It also enables us to offer more interesting non-payment use cases for merchants and consumers.
“Our partnership with LISNR will give us a strong advantage in attaining our goal of 120,000 merchants in the next two years by offering yet another easy, contactless, and seamless way to make payments and drive loyalty with their customers.”
As the African fintech revolution continues to grow at a fast rate, billions are being invested to try and tap into one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, one that overwhelmingly favours tech-enabled solutions.
This is coming after Paga recently with their partnership with Untapped Global. As they rapidly try to scale from 33,000 merchants to 120,000 merchants within the next 2 years, it’s imperative that they bring on partners that provide complementary solutions aligned with their overall objective of facilitating a 400 per cent growth.
On his part, Mr Eric Allen, CEO, LISNR added, “Paga is the household name for Fintechs in all of Nigeria and is one of the market leaders in all of Africa.
“We believe our contactless & secure proximity solution will enable a seamless authentication process across its growing user and merchant database.
“With our easy to implement a solution and our proven savings for merchants, we’re well-positioned to help Paga in their goal of scaling to 120,000 merchants in two years,” he added.
Modupe Gbadeyanka 
Business Post Contributor