By Adedapo Adesanya
Visa has partnered with growing fintech, Flocash, to promote digital capabilities for African small and medium-scale enterprises (SMEs) through digital payments, supplier solutions and access to financial services.
SMEs account for 90 per cent of all businesses in Africa but have an annual financing gap of over $136 billion, according to IFC. A digitized SME sector will unlock the huge market potential of the African continent underpinned by rapid population growth.
The first step in this partnership is the launch of Flostore, powered by a Visa digital wallet and the Flocash pan -African payment platform, which can help small businesses accept digital payments, manage supplies and access financial services across Africa.
In addition to Flostore, Flocash and Visa will work together to embed financing in payments and bring the element of analytics, bookkeeping and reconciliation to small businesses through Visa’s dynamic underwriting capabilities that include buy now pay later structures.
Speaking on the partnership, Ms Corine Mbiaketcha, Vice President and General Manager for East Africa at Visa said, “Visa is committed to expanding the digitization of payments across Africa.
“With partners like Flocash, our goal is to enable African businesses to access our payments ecosystem and technologies to enable them to innovatively and efficiently serve their customers. This partnership with Flocash, as well as the launch of Flostore, are an important step towards achieving this goal.”
“Flocash has grown significantly as a travel payments processor over the last few years, and we are thrilled to partner with them to build innovative payments solutions that reduce friction in commerce for merchants in East Africa,” Ms Mbiaketcha added.
Adding to this, Mr Sirak Mussie, Managing Director of Flocash said, “Visa is a great partner to scale Flocash’s pan-African payment platform and develop this critical area of African commerce that can offer enormous continent-wide economic development opportunities.”
Through digitization, SMEs can use their digital footprint to tap into both traditional and alternative sources of funding to expand commerce while banks lower operating costs as they increase their revenue base.
Digitization of the lending process enables banks to streamline their inefficient processes for SME lending and deliver value to their customers.
Business Post Contributor 
Dipo Olowookere