Traction, a Nigeria-based merchant solution platform, has announced a $6 million seed round for service acceleration and expansion in Nigeria. The new round of investment has commitments from investors like Pan-African investor Ventures Platform and Multiply Partners, P1 Ventures- a venture capital firm, and other investors.
Traction allows merchants to receive payments, manage accounts, and gain access to a range of tools which include a full retail POS system, E-commerce, and invoicing. The fintech platform also helps SMEs to access capital to keep businesses running.
In an interview with Techcrunch, Traction Founders, Mayowa Alli and Dolapo Adejuyigbe said the company was set up to solve the financial services stumbling block faced by SMEs. It is a bank-independent platform that enables an end-to-end sales payment cycle, and access to additional services to help businesses expand, then progress to other services such as merchant wallets, cash advance loans, savings, and bill payments.
Traction focuses on both classic and premium merchants, serving as the initial contact with digital payment means and financial services for the two categories of merchants who are also over 75% of the platform users. The company’s platform also has products ranging from food and restaurants, fast-moving consumer goods, grocery chains, fashion, beauty, lifestyle enterprises, electronics retailers, and healthcare facilities.
Traction says it has gained more merchants across Africa’s largest financial services sector than its competitors since its inception. Traction’s products provide retail business owners with more direct services than other platforms which mediate through agents by distributing POS terminals before adding software and business tools to complement the terminals.
It has collaborated with other ecosystem actors to provide some of its services, such as restaurants and hotels that can access their menus and reservation management systems, which are easily integrated with their payment systems.
About Traction
Traction was founded in 2020, and it functions as a one-stop management tool for both online and offline enterprises. Payment, e-commerce, lending, supply chain, and inventory management have all seen a surge of innovation in the SME arena. As a result, SMEs are forced to use different solutions without the ability to consolidate data.
Traction Apps, in addition to combining critical business operation tools on a single platform, can be viewed as the next innovation for in-person payment, as various tech platforms are currently pushing online payment.
However, there is a vacuum to be filled in terms of offline payment. With card payments, for example, there is a significant time lag in obtaining POS Terminals, a high rate of denied transactions, the requirement for several terminals, which equates to merchants creating multiple bank accounts, delayed confirmation of bank transfer payments, and fraud warnings.
Read More: Technology is improving the performance of African SMEs but less than 7% of them use it
Technext Newsletter
Get the best of Africa’s daily tech to your inbox – first thing every morning.
Join the community now!
