It’s been 15 years that Paga, a Nigerian fintech company, embarked on a mission of Making Life Possible for Nigerians.
Paga created a payments ecosystem that makes it easy for Nigerians to access and use their money and the extraordinary journey has led to it processing 335 million transactions, worth over N14 trillion or $32 billion, in the past 15 years.
The statistic, Paga said, attests to Nigeria’s growing adoption of mobile money which was even highlighted in a recent report by the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement Systems (NIBSS).
Tayo Oviosu, the founder and CEO, Paga, who disclosed this, at an event to mark the company’s 15th anniversary, in Lagos, said, Paga currently has 23 million users.
“At the end of March, 2024, we had processed 335 million transactions since inception, worth over N14 trillion or $32 billion and 80 per cent of that we did in the last five years. This last quarter was our best quarter ever,” Oviosu revealed.
Listing the company’s accomplishments over the previous 15 years, Oviosu stated that creating jobs has enabled the organisation to empower a number of people.
He claimed that the company has employed 1,000 people directly and over 100,000 people indirectly through its network of agents around the nation.
The founder of Paga stated that the company has grown beyond the agent network, servicing 150 enterprises and offering platform-as-a-service to others as a means of infrastructure provision.
On the security measures, Oviosu said:
“We have made sure that every step on the way, we have multiple layers of security to our system, to our customers, to protect their accounts.
“We are Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) certified, a widely accepted set of policies and procedures intended to optimise the security certification.”
As efforts to give back to the society, the CEO averred that Paga has partnered with Utiva, a tech training platform, to empower 18 women with scholarships to learn desired in-demand skills in tech.
He commended the regulator for formulating policies that have helped the Fintech industry to grow in recent times.
“The regulator has made very clear the categorisation and that has attracted a lot of competitors. And that’s a good thing. We don’t look at that as a bad thing because it also keeps us on our toes.
And so all the competitors are a bit different in how they do things. I think our market is very similar to India. I don’t think it’s a winner-takes-all because there is no one person in Nigeria that has only one financial account. I’ve not met a Nigerian who has only one account. So, it’s not a winner-takes-all, but you probably have one that you prefer,” the Paga CEO said.
Good job all the way paga to the world