USE CASES

Success Stories: From Consultancy to Code: Engineering a Unified Merchant-Consumer Payment Switch for the African Market

Problem: The "High-Fee" Barrier in African Commerce

  • Expensive Transaction Intermediaries: Traditional card networks and mobile money providers often charge high fees that eat into the thin margins of African SMEs and micro-merchants.

  • Fragmented Payment Methods: Merchants struggle to manage separate systems for different mobile money wallets and bank transfers, leading to missed sales and reconciliation errors.

  • Hardware Accessibility: The high cost of traditional POS terminals prevents millions of small businesses from accepting digital payments, forcing a continued reliance on cash.

  • Complex Backend Architecture: Building a scalable, secure payment switch that can handle thousands of concurrent transactions across multiple African telco APIs is a massive technical hurdle.

  • User Experience Gap: Many existing payment tools are not optimized for the local context, lacking the simplicity required for both non-tech-savvy merchants and high-frequency consumers.

Solution: End-to-End Payment Ecosystem for customer in East Africa

  • Comprehensive Mobile App Suite: Our team engineered high-performance, native mobile applications for both Customers and Merchants, ensuring a seamless, high-speed transaction experience across the ecosystem.

  • Merchant “SoftPOS” & QR Strategy: We built the tools that allow merchants to accept payments using only their smartphones via dynamic QR codes, eliminating the need for expensive hardware.

  • Multi-Tiered Sub-Wallet Architecture: We provided a flexible sub-wallet system allowing users to partition funds for specific purposes, such as budgeting, savings goals, or categorized spending, directly within their main account.

  • Integrated Loyalty & Rewards Engine: We built a custom loyalty module that enables merchants to offer cashback, point-based rewards, and digital stamps, incentivizing repeat customer behavior and driving platform growth.

  • Strategic Backend Consultancy: Beyond coding, we provided high-level architectural consultancy, designing a secure, scalable backend capable of processing real-time payments across various African markets.

  • Deep API & Telco Integrations: We managed the complex task of integrating with multiple mobile money providers and banks including M-Pesa, creating a unified “switch” that simplifies the payment flow for the end-user.

  • User-Centric UI/UX Design: We designed the interface to be intuitive and “low-friction,” specifically optimized for the unique connectivity and device constraints of the East African market.

  • Real-Time Settlement & Reporting: We implemented a robust dashboard for merchants, providing instant notification of successful payments and automated reconciliation tools.

  • Enterprise-Grade Security: Our team ensured the platform adheres to global security standards, implementing multi-factor authentication and encrypted transaction rails to protect user funds.

  • Agile Offshore Development: By leveraging our  dev hubs, we provided the customer with a world-class engineering team that could iterate rapidly while maintaining a lean operational budget.

Results

We delivered a comprehensive digital payment ecosystem , consisting of native Customer and Hybrid Merchant apps and a scalable backend architecture. Through strategic consultancy and complex API integrations, we enabled affordable, hardware-free QR payments across the country. Our team’s end-to-end support transformed the customer into a high-speed, low-cost alternative to traditional payment networks at an optimized development cost.