E-commerce platform Jumia announced the launch of JumiaPay Egypt as a payment service provider (PSP), after obtaining the Central Bank of Egypt’s (CBE) required licences and approvals, according to a recent press release.
The new PSP comes as part of Jumia’s strategic partnership with the National Bank of Egypt (NBE), with an objective of facilitating online payments as well as the distribution of various digital and financial services.
Merchants will benefit from the payment facilitator (PayFac) solution offered by JumiaPay, which will also act as a payment processor enabling payment processing outside Jumia’s main platform.
Managing Director of JumiaPay Egypt, Tawfik Mahmoud, said: “Merchants can properly manage the acceptance of digital payments through a single central digital platform instead of undergoing long and overpriced processes with direct integration for their different local and international payment methods.”
Mahmoud added: “We just did our first off-platform transaction, we’re currently in the beta phase and the integration of some merchants, after which we will be ready to expand as the number of JumiaPay transactions increased by one third to 3 million in the third quarter of the 2021 year, representing approximately 36% of the platform orders for the group level.”
The PSP will further offer payment processing models enabling digital economy through convenient, secure, and easy-to-use payment solutions, which will enhance trust between consumers and other businesses. Therefore, this move will boost financial inclusion and digital transformation in Egypt, and Africa in general.
CEO of Jumia Egypt, Hesham Safwat, said: “This milestone comes after the successes achieved by Jumia in the field of digital payments and is in line with the overall direction of the Egyptian state to transform into a cashless society and the move towards financial inclusion in Egypt.”
In his recent interview with Mubasher, Safwat remarked that “COVID-19 impacted positively on the growth of digital services, either e-commerce or online payments and services worldwide.”
The first beneficiary of JumiaPay’s financial services was Zbooni Company, which was founded in the UAE in 2016.
CEO and Co-Founder of Zbooni, Ramy Assaf, said: “Through JumiaPay we can seamlessly integrate our platform with their payment gateway capabilities, providing safe and secure transactions for the businesses we serve.”
