Nigerian payments startup, Flutterwave, has partnered Visa to launch a consumer payment product for Africa called GetBarter. This new service allows for individuals and small merchants across Africa to make secure remittances.
As part of this partnership, existing Visa cardholders would be able to send and receive funds at home or internationally using GetBarter. However, customers who don’t have Visa cards but hold accounts or mobile wallets on other platforms would be able to create a virtual Visa card to link to the app.
Through this partnership, Flutterwave is looking at expanding this solution to get across to everyone in Africa with a payment need. This is in contrast to its Rave solution, a payment getaway for big companies.
“Rave is B2B, this is more B2B2C since we’re reaching the consumers of our customers. The target market is pretty much everyone who has a payment need in Africa. That includes the entire customer base of M-Pesa, the entire bank customer base in Nigeria, mobile money and bank customers in Ghana—pretty much the entire continent,” Flutterwave CEO Olugbenga Agboola told TechCrunch in an interview.
For every transaction made, GetBarter would charge roughly 40 Naira, or 11 cents. This is where Flutterwave gets it revenue as well as from fees paid by financial institutions on cards created.
For the initial rollout, Flutterwave and Visa will focus on reaching out to those already using mobile money and bank services. This first phase includes building a GetBarter user base amongst the banked in Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa. They plan to reach out to the unbanked later.
With this partnership, Flutterwave continues to step up its payment offering, making payment transactions seamless for Africans.
This is not the first of its kind by the fintech startup as Flutterwave has previously partnered with Tempo Money Transfer, a European blockchain company as well as Flywire, another global payments company.
The GetBarter App can be downloaded on the Apple iOS store and Google Playstore.