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- Fintech ClickPesa integrates Stellar Lumens to execute cross-border payments to East Africa.
- ClickPesa offers services in cooperation with 3 money operators in Africa: Tigo, M-Pesa, and Airtel.
The Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) has announced an integration with fintech ClickPesa to bring easy cross-border payments to consumers in Africa. The fintech operates as an Anchor in the Stellar Lumens blockchain using the SEP-24 standard transaction flow.
ClickPesa is a company created by two Stellar Lumens developers, Rick Groothuizen and Richard Lema. The fintech is a platform that offers Business-to-Business (B2B) payment services, payment management, payment collection automation, currency exchange, among others.
According to the SDF, ClickPesa offers its users a “clean” interface and is aimed at making the process of running a small or medium-sized business in Africa much easier. Therefore, ClickPesa gives its users the ability to create a “portal account” that connects to their bank accounts or allows them to create one after completing a Know Your Customer (KYC) process. The SDF adds:
Seeing an opportunity to reduce the friction inherent to intra-African cross-border payments and P2P payment activity, ClickPesa also serves as an Anchor on the Stellar network and provides on/off-ramps to the banking systems of Tanzania, Kenya, and Rwanda.
Facilitating payments from Europe to Africa with Stellar Lumens
Fintech has been operating mainly in Tanzania for 7 years but will expand its operations to Kenya and Rwanda. In the region, a large part of the population is outside the financial system. This is due to the distance between banks, located in large cities, and the costs of maintaining a bank account.
It is estimated that about 30 million of Tanzania’s 56 million people have access to a smartphone. In comparison, only 5 million have a bank account. Therefore, ClickPesa wants to “empower consumers in East Africa” by allowing them to use the Internet to access financial services.
This way, ClickPesa users will be able to benefit from the integration with the Stellar Lumens payment network through 3 money operators in East Africa: Tigo, Vodacom (M-Pesa), and Airtel. In cooperation with these companies, ClickPesa has enabled cross-border transactions and its users can receive payments directly from a bank account in Europe to an account in Tanzania.
In addition to the integration of Stellar Lumens with the referred money operators, Click is in the process of obtaining cooperation with a bank that has operations in 36 countries, the SDF reported. Therefore, its services could be expanded in the near future.
