Payments & Financial Infrastructure

Payments work in Nigeria splits into three kinds of problem. There is acceptance, which is getting money from a payer into an account reliably and proving afterwards that it arrived. There is resale, where an operator buys airtime, data or connectivity wholesale and sells it on with their own pricing and their own brand. And there is the plumbing, which is the unglamorous work of making a payment processor’s API behave the same way in testing as it does in production.

We build in all three. The acceptance work runs from a full payment gateway platform down to tap-to-phone terminals that turn an ordinary Android handset into a contactless card reader. The resale work is multi-tenant by default, because an operator who succeeds immediately wants to onboard other operators underneath them.

The integration tooling exists because we got tired of discovering a processor’s undocumented behaviour in production. A mock server that faithfully reproduces a gateway’s API, including its error cases, pays for itself the first time it catches a mistake before a customer does.