Africa’s digital economy is expanding rapidly, now exceeding $180 billion in value. Yet moving money across the continent remains challenging due to fragmented payment systems – each country has its own currencies, mobile money platforms, and regulations. With 70% of the world’s $1 trillion mobile money market in Africa and credit card usage still under 3%, local payment solutions have become essential. A new generation of African payment gateway providers has emerged to bridge these gaps, enabling businesses and consumers to transact seamlessly across different countries and payment methods. Below we provide an overview of ten leading payment gateways shaping Africa’s digital payments landscape, and how they are powering e-commerce, fintech innovation, and financial inclusion across the continent.
Flutterwave is one of Africa’s most prominent payment gateway companies, often cited as a fintech success story. Founded in Nigeria in 2016, Flutterwave provides a unified payments infrastructure that connects 34 African countries through one platform. Its gateway allows merchants to accept a wide range of payment methods – from international cards to local mobile money wallets – via easy-to-integrate APIs and checkout tools. This seamless integration helps global businesses overcome Africa’s fragmented payment rails by connecting to local banks, mobile money networks, and card systems through a single interface.
Flutterwave’s growth has been remarkable. By 2022, the company had processed over 200 million transactions and achieved a valuation of $3 billion, making it one of Africa’s highest-valued startups. It holds multiple operating licenses across Africa, the US, and Europe, enabling cross-border payments and remittances at scale. In practice, Flutterwave’s platform powers online payments for e-commerce stores, ride-hailing apps, travel bookings, and even enables peer-to-peer transfers and remittance services via its Flutterwave Send product. Its success demonstrates the demand for a pan-African gateway that simplifies payments for merchants and developers. With significant funding and a growing merchant base, Flutterwave continues to expand its reach and innovate in areas like pay-by-bank, virtual cards, and SME lending, solidifying its role as a backbone for digital commerce in Africa.
Paystack is another Nigerian-born payment gateway that has transformed online commerce in West Africa. Launched in 2015, Paystack quickly gained popularity for its developer-friendly APIs and smooth checkout experience, making it easy for businesses of all sizes to start accepting online payments. Today, more than 60,000 businesses in Nigeria and Ghana use Paystack to collect payments securely – ranging from e-commerce stores and SaaS subscriptions to schools and utilities. Impressively, Paystack processes over half of all online transactions in Nigeria, reflecting the platform’s dominance in its home market.
Paystack supports multiple payment options including local and international bank cards, mobile money, bank transfers, and QR payments, ensuring merchants can serve customers with their preferred methods. The company’s rapid growth and strong execution attracted global attention – in 2020, U.S. payments giant Stripe acquired Paystack for over $200 million, marking one of Africa’s largest fintech acquisitions. Despite being part of Stripe, Paystack continues to operate independently and has expanded to other countries (such as a pilot in South Africa) while benefitting from Stripe’s resources. Paystack’s success underscores how tailored solutions for the African market – with features like localized payment channels and easy onboarding – can unlock massive online commerce opportunities. For African entrepreneurs and developers, Paystack remains a go-to gateway for its reliability, transparent pricing, and robust tools (including detailed dashboards, fraud detection, and subscription billing) that help businesses scale across the continent.
Nigeria’s Interswitch is a pioneering name in African digital payments, with a legacy dating back to 2002. Initially established as a national transaction switch connecting banks and ATMs, Interswitch has grown into a broad integrated payments and digital commerce platform. It created much of the foundational “rails” for Nigeria’s electronic banking system, helping transition the economy from cash-based to digital. Over the years, Interswitch introduced Verve, Africa’s first domestic card scheme (now used by millions of cardholders), and Quickteller, a payment app and bill-pay platform linking consumers to merchants and service providers. These services established Interswitch as a household brand for everyday transactions like ATM withdrawals, online bill payments, and funds transfers.
Interswitch’s prominence and profitability eventually led to it becoming one of Africa’s first fintech unicorns. In 2019, a strategic investment by Visa valued Interswitch at $1 billion, confirming its status as one of the continent’s most valuable fintech firms. Today, Interswitch’s operations span beyond Nigeria into East and West Africa – it has a physical presence in countries like Kenya, Uganda, and Gambia, and its products are used in 23 African countries. For businesses, Interswitch offers gateway solutions (for example, enabling e-commerce card payments via its Webpay product), merchant POS services, and cross-border payment capabilities leveraging its network of bank partnerships. As a mature player, Interswitch combines local market insight with enterprise-grade infrastructure, continuing to innovate (such as launching contactless payment tech and fintech venture funds) while ensuring stability for Africa’s growing digital payment ecosystem. Its two decades of experience make it a critical enabler of payments infrastructure that newer gateways often build upon.
Kenya-based Pesapal has evolved over the last decade into a leading payment gateway serving East Africa’s businesses. Founded in 2009, Pesapal was born out of necessity – when its founder Liko Agosta needed a local solution to accept payments for an online travel portal and none existed. From those humble beginnings (literally processing just a handful of transactions in its first year), Pesapal has steadily grown into an end-to-end fintech platform. It enables merchants to accept digital payments both online and in-store, while also offering industry-specific solutions.
Pesapal’s core gateway allows businesses to accept a wide range of payment methods. These include major credit/debit cards (Visa, Mastercard, American Express) as well as popular mobile money wallets like M-Pesa, Airtel Money, and MTN Mobile Money. This versatility is crucial in East Africa, where mobile money is ubiquitous. Pesapal also provides a unified merchant dashboard for tracking transactions, generating reports, and managing payouts. For brick-and-mortar commerce, Pesapal’s Sabi POS terminals are widely used in Kenya and neighboring countries – these Android-based devices accept both card swipes and mobile money QR/payments on one machine, simplifying in-person checkout for retailers and restaurants. The company has even developed vertical products like ReservePort (a booking and payment engine for hotels) and TicketSasa (an event ticketing platform), leveraging its payment rails to serve specific sectors.
Operating across multiple East African countries, Pesapal helps businesses expand regionally with support for cross-border transactions and multi-currency settlement. Its longevity and focus on sustainable growth (Pesapal prides itself on achieving profitability without heavy VC funding) have earned it trust among merchants. In 2025, Kenya’s KCB Group took a strategic stake in Pesapal, signaling confidence in its future. For merchants and fintech partners in Africa, Pesapal offers a reliable, locally attuned gateway that has been “grinding” since the early days of digital payments in the region, integrating new payment options as they arise while maintaining secure and stable service.
DPO Group (formerly Direct Pay Online) has built a pan-African payment gateway network with a particularly strong footprint in Eastern and Southern Africa. DPO began in Kenya and expanded through acquisitions of other payment providers, assembling a broad platform that serves online merchants across 21 African countries. From e-commerce sites and travel booking portals to airlines and hotels, DPO’s gateway enables businesses to accept payments in local currencies via cards (Visa, MasterCard, Amex), mobile money, and alternative methods. A key value proposition of DPO is its multi-currency and multi-channel support – merchants can get paid by customers around the world while DPO handles currency conversion and settlement into the merchant’s preferred currency, easing cross-border e-commerce.
By 2021, DPO Group had onboarded over 60,000 merchants continent-wide, making it one of the largest online payment facilitators in Africa. Its growth culminated in a landmark acquisition: Network International, a leading payments company in the Middle East & Africa, acquired DPO for ~$291 million in 2021. This deal not only validated the importance of African payment gateways on the global stage, but also provided DPO with additional resources to innovate and scale. Under Network International, DPO continues to operate in Africa (sometimes branded as “DPO Pay”), offering enhanced technology and broader reach. It maintains local operations in countries ranging from Kenya, Tanzania, and South Africa to Nigeria and Egypt. Merchants using DPO benefit from features like tokenization (for secure card-on-file payments), fraud screening, and integration plugins for popular e-commerce platforms. For stakeholders in Africa’s payment industry, DPO’s journey illustrates how a homegrown gateway can achieve continent-wide coverage, and how international partnerships are driving further growth in the African payments space.
While many gateways focus on merchant integrations, PalmPay has taken a slightly different approach – building a massive consumer-focused digital wallet and payment platform that in turn creates new opportunities for merchants. Launched in Nigeria in 2019, PalmPay quickly rose to prominence by offering a slick mobile app for peer-to-peer transfers, bill payments, and fintech services with attractive incentives (cashback rewards, free transfers, etc.). Backed by China’s Transsion (Africa’s largest smartphone maker) and other investors, PalmPay leveraged strategic advantages like being pre-installed on Tecno and Infinix phones, and an on-the-ground agent network, to rapidly acquire users.
As of 2025, PalmPay reports over 35 million registered users on its platform – a staggering growth in just a few years, making it one of Africa’s fastest-growing fintech apps. Those users perform about 15 million transactions per day on PalmPay, ranging from money transfers and QR code payments at shops to airtime purchases and loan repayments. PalmPay has also recruited over 1 million merchant agents (similar to mobile money agents) who facilitate cash-in, cash-out, and serve as local touchpoints to sign up more customers. While PalmPay started as a peer-to-peer payment app, it is increasingly part of the payment gateway ecosystem: merchants can accept PalmPay as a payment method (via QR scan or merchant codes), and the company is rolling out business solutions like merchant wallets and APIs. Its huge user base essentially acts as a network that merchants can tap into – accepting PalmPay can give businesses instant access to millions of customers who prefer using their PalmPay balance or app for transactions.
PalmPay’s success highlights the importance of mobile-centric payment solutions in Africa’s cash-light future. It was even recognized by the Financial Times as one of Africa’s fastest growing companies. Now profitable and eyeing expansion beyond Nigeria (to other African markets and even Asia), PalmPay represents the convergence of consumer fintech and payment processing. For investors and payment industry observers, PalmPay’s trajectory shows how combining a digital banking app with a wide acceptance network can drive financial inclusion at scale – complementing the work of pure payment gateways by creating more digitally-enabled customers and merchants across Africa.
Onafriq – recently rebranded from MFS Africa – stands out as the continent’s largest digital payments network, connecting a vast array of mobile money systems, bank accounts, and fintech platforms into one interoperable hub. Founded around 2009 by Dare Okoudjou, the company began as a “mobile money switch,” tackling the problem of different telecom operators’ mobile wallets being siloed from one another. Over 15 years, it has evolved into a comprehensive omni-channel payments network spanning over 40 African markets. Onafriq’s network now connects nearly 1 billion mobile money wallets and 500 million bank accounts across Africa – an unparalleled reach that essentially links the fragmented financial systems of many countries into a single web.
What this means in practice is that a fintech or merchant integrated with Onafriq can send and receive payments to almost any African mobile wallet or bank, even across borders. For example, Onafriq enables a user in Côte d’Ivoire to send money directly to someone’s mobile money wallet in Uganda, or a Nigerian e-commerce platform to pay out to a vendor’s bank account in Kenya – all through API calls on its platform. This capability addresses the historic reliance on expensive correspondent banking for cross-border African transactions. By providing a local alternative, Onafriq aims to reduce transaction costs and increase speed for cross-border payments, as evidenced by its recent partnership to incorporate USDC stablecoin for settlement.
Onafriq’s role is often behind-the-scenes – powering other fintechs, money transfer operators, banks, and even global remittance firms that want access to Africa’s payment networks. It offers services like offline agent banking, currency exchange, and even card issuing as part of its network. In short, Onafriq functions as “the payments network for Africa,” much like Visa or SWIFT but tailored to the continent’s mobile-first reality. For stakeholders, Onafriq (MFS Africa) exemplifies how African fintech innovation is not just about front-end apps, but also about building the infrastructure glue that connects disparate systems into one interoperable ecosystem.
Tingg is a pan-African payment gateway platform developed by Cellulant, a fintech company founded in Kenya in 2003. Tingg addresses a critical need for businesses operating across Africa: a one-stop payment solution that aggregates all the diverse payment methods into a single streamlined experience. Through one integration, Tingg connects merchants to over 370 different payment channels – from mobile money operators and bank transfer systems to global card networks like Visa, Mastercard, and regional switches like Nigeria’s NIBSS and Verve.
Cellulant’s goal with Tingg is to “make it easy to collect payments online and offline” regardless of country or payment type. The platform supports online payments via web and mobile, in-app payments, USSD, and even generates pay-by-link or QR code options – catering to all contexts from e-commerce websites to point-of-sale situations. Tingg’s robust capabilities have made it a preferred partner for large enterprises and multinationals expanding in Africa. It powers payments for major airlines (like Emirates, KLM, Kenya Airways), e-commerce marketplaces (like Jumia), ride-hailing apps (Bolt), and more. These companies leverage Tingg to ensure customers can pay with whatever local method they prefer, improving conversion rates and customer experience.
Security and compliance are also a focus – Tingg is PCI-DSS certified and Cellulant is ISO-certified in various categories. By 2023, Cellulant had also rolled out Tingg in new markets like Ghana and partnered with global firms (e.g., Mastercard) to expand digital payment options. For Africa’s payment industry stakeholders, Tingg represents the move towards consolidation and interoperability, simplifying the continent’s notorious payment fragmentation for businesses. It underscores the idea that the best payment gateway is one that bridges all others – and Tingg strives to be that bridge, accelerating digital commerce by connecting banks, mobile wallets, and cards in one network.
Rounding out our list is VoguePay, a Nigeria-based payment gateway known for its accessibility and appeal to small and mid-sized businesses. Founded in 2012, VoguePay’s mission was to democratize online payments for entrepreneurs and SMEs who found existing solutions too expensive or cumbersome. The platform is economical and easy to integrate with websites and online stores, offering plugins and simple APIs for popular content management and e-commerce systems. This ease of use, along with no setup fees and flexible pricing, made VoguePay an attractive option for startups and small merchants entering the e-commerce space.
Despite its relatively low profile compared to the fintech unicorns, VoguePay has quietly grown a large user base. It now supports over 200,000 businesses across Africa on its platform, a testament to the demand among SMEs for digital payment solutions. Through VoguePay, merchants can accept payments via local and international cards (Visa, Mastercard, Verve), direct bank transfers, and even mobile money in some regions. Funds can be settled to merchants in multiple currencies. The gateway emphasizes security (PCI-DSS compliance and anti-fraud tools) while keeping the technical integration straightforward – merchants can start receiving payments within minutes of signing up.
VoguePay also supports individuals and freelancers, allowing them to send and receive payments with or without a formal website, which adds to its popularity in the gig economy. By focusing on ease and cost-effectiveness, VoguePay carved out a niche as a “payments enabler for the masses”, complementing the larger gateways that target big enterprises. It demonstrates that in Africa’s diverse market, there is room for specialized players catering to different segments – and serving SMEs well is key to unlocking the long tail of e-commerce growth. For many small African businesses making their first online sale, VoguePay has been the gateway that powers their journey.
Conclusion
From Lagos to Nairobi and Cape Town, these payment gateways are driving Africa’s digital payments revolution. Each provider has its strengths: some excel in pan-African coverage and cross-border interoperability, while others focus on local market needs or specific customer segments. Collectively, they are lowering barriers for businesses to participate in the digital economy by supporting every way Africans pay – be it mobile money, cards, bank transfer, or wallet. They also foster innovation, competition, and partnerships in the fintech space (as seen in acquisitions like Stripe–Paystack or collaborations like Onafriq–Circle).
For African business owners, fintech professionals, and investors, understanding this landscape is crucial. These gateways not only offer payment processing but also additional value – analytics dashboards, fraud prevention, multi-currency settlement, and financial services – becoming strategic growth partners for merchants. As Africa’s e-commerce and fintech sectors continue their double-digit growth, these ten providers will remain central to the narrative, each playing a role in connecting the continent’s 1.4 billion people to the opportunities of a cash-lite, digital-first economy. The payment gateway you choose can determine how easily customers can pay you, wherever they are in Africa. With options like Flutterwave, Pesapal, Interswitch, DPO, PalmPay, Paystack, Onafriq, Tingg, and VoguePay, businesses have an expanding toolkit to build trust with customers and scale across borders through seamless, secure transactions. The continued collaboration and growth of these platforms signal a future where Africa’s payment fragmentation gives way to a more unified, inclusive financial ecosystem, powering prosperity across the continent.
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