As young Nigerians are having a tough week protesting against the unjust brutality by disbanded SARS police unit usually meted out on young creatives in the country, the news of Paystack being acquired by tech giant, Stripe, is a breath of fresh air.
Paystack, which is a leading Nigerian online payments processing startup co-founded in 2015 by Shola Akinlade and Ezra Olubi will be joining Stripe to accelerate online and offline commerce across Africa.
With over 60,000 patronage of their services, Paystack is a tech company powering growth for businesses in Africa through collection of secure payment tools – suite of collections, disbursements, identity verification, reporting, and other commerce tools to grow their business across the African continent.
The firm which is PCI DSS Level 1 certified with five years in existence has serviced high profile clients in Africa like MTN, FedEX, the Lagos Internal Revenue Service, AXA Mansard as well as vendors who deploy their service to process hundreds of millions of dollars each month.
Speaking on this audacious move of joining the Stripe family, CEO of Paystack, Shola Akinlade excitedly notes that Paystack will remain tenacious in their operations with no disruptions of service as a result of acquisition and that their users should not worry about their technical integrations. Paystack merchants and partners are expected to look forward to more payment channels, more tools, accelerated geographical expansion as well as deeper integrations with global platforms.
Why is Stripe’s acquisition of Paystack a big deal?
Stripe is an American financial services technology company notable for building economic infrastructure for the internet. Companies of all sizes – including Amazon, Google, Shopify and Zoom uses Stripe’s software to process payments and scale their online businesses.
The tech company that combines payments platform with applications that put revenue data at the heart of business operations acquired Paystack for $200 million and completes purchasing for more than 80% of American adults every year.
Acquiring Paystack is the culmination of a close partnership between Stripe and Paystack over the years and the acquisition comes as the largest made by stripe till date.
Paystack currently works remotely across 9 countries with a relentless drive to fix and improve Africa’s financial infrastructure.
