The last time I rated payment gateways in Nigeria was in 2015. It has been six years now and a lot has changed about the payment space: they are new regulations and guidance by CBN. Also new players have emerged with superb products. Going through my old posts and seeing what is obtainable now in the payment space, I can only see great improvements. There is almost a new payment platform every day in Nigeria, but I will do the due diligence of bringing to you the crème de la crème of them all. In this post, I will be talking about the unique things you can achieve with all these platforms.  As a matter of fact, they are so unique that you can integrate all of them on your platform for a convenient and smooth experience by your customers.

I have always been an advocate for easy multiple payment options for customers and I think we are in the age and time that this is coming to a reality. I would base my assessment on: integration work flow, vulnerability, documentation, support and setup convenience. For clarity and convenience, I will place my review of the payment gateways in an ascending order of significance.

Are you good to go with me?

Rave by Flutterwaves

Paystack would probably have been in this position because of their superb user experience and support but Flutterwave is bigger with more offers at it's disposal. It may appear as though they are exchanging product managers. However, Flutterwaves gives you access to many Africa countries and delivers some other interesting payment options to their merchants like Paypal, USSD, Alipay, Virtual Cards to mention a few. If you would like to accept foreign payments, Flutterwaves is your plug (hopefully with the new acquisition of Paystack by Stipe, they might also be doing this anytime soon). This post is about Flutterwave's payment gateway (so Bodun focus!).  Let us see what it means to choose Flutterwaves as payment gateway.

Paystack

This is a payment gateway that is the delight of all developers because it makes life so easy for them. With little or no support, you can get everything done. They have almost everything to make your life easy, plugins, SDKs and sample codes. They started the " pay through bank transfers" which I feel is such a lovely option.

Ogaranya

Ogaranya brings in a new dimension to payments, it helps you to accept offline payments. Imagine you have a product/service that you would like your customers to buy directly from a radio show or through your fliers, you can integrate with Ogaranya and they will help your customer purchase through SMS/WhatsApp/Telegram e.tc

Merchant can take advantage of their SMS Invoicing and great innovation around offline payments to receive payments. They currently power NeoLife’s SMS/WhatsApp product purchase which I feel is such an innovative way to buy in a country with low internet penetration. Again, it is convenient to buy and stay on the same app…why install a new app to buy? 

PaywithSpecta

This is another interesting payment gateway: this gateway can allow your customers pay for products/services on your platform through loan. The gateway is powered by Sterling bank but it is not compulsory for your customers to have a Sterling Bank account. In few steps, customers who do not own account with them can register and be profiled for credit they can use to shop on any of the platforms integrated with them.

One thing they will also do for you is also help you push your platform to people that have the Sepcta account already, all you need to do is sit back and watch your website flood with requests. It is available to online stores and walk-in (offline) stores.

I integrated this gateway on Livestock247 platform and you need to have seen the kind of support they gave to the business. In fact, the customer service personnel of the company got so much requests that they couldn’t keep up. This platform gives your customers flexibility of not paying immediately. If you need any payment gateway on your platform, please consider having PayWithSpecta and thank me later.

Monnify

Monnify by TeamApt presents another interesting angle to payments. They offer you virtual account number generation that you can tie to each of your customers. Your customers who do not use their cards but will always love to transfer from their bank account can use this option. You can create the account in their names and your customers can transfer into these bank accounts. Your platform will receive notification when a payment is made,so you can update all you need to update and fulfil the order. A lot can be done with this lovely innovation, merchants with chain of stores can decide to create these accounts for their cashier points and there will be no issue of someone waiting to get alert from “Madam” that is in one area enjoying herself. 

Hope my review is helpful, see you next year. You can join my friends list to get more about my technical rants.

Disclaimer: I wrote this based on my personal experience with these payment gateways and some information I could get online. I have not done this to ridicule or advertise any platform. I have also based my assumption on the materials and information available to me as at the time of writing this piece. 

Movement!