Paga Surpasses Paypal, First Bank as Nigeria’s Mobile King

Nigeria’s largest mobile money service, Paga, reached a new milestone on Wednesday when its users hit 5 million. The highest among any of the 21 Nigeria mobile money services.

The mobile money service provider is the single largest network of financial access points in Nigeria with over 10,000 agents and reportedly processed US$1 billion between January 2012 and June 2015.

In the last 12 months, Paga has processed over US$800 million by doing mainly money transfers, unlike early days when bill payments form the bulk of its primary transaction set.

Last month, the mobile giant reached 900,000 active users and estimated to hit 1 million active users by the end of the fourth quarter of 2016.

“There are not many financial institutions in Nigeria who have 1 million active users,” said Tayo Oviosu, the Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Paga.

This includes First Bank’s First Monie that has about two million subscribers and eTranzact’s Pocket Moni.

In July, PayPal lauded Nigeria as its third largest mobile shopper worldwide and estimated that about $819 million will be processed this year, more than $610 million recorded last year.

This, PayPal attributed to Nigerian growing online shoppers and the realization of how easy it is to shop across the globe via mobile devices.

According to Tayo Oviosu, this is key to Paga’s future growth.

“The ability to send money P2P and to pay businesses (online and offline) will be the major driver of our growth in this phase of our history,” Oviosu wrote in a Medium post.

Presently, Paga is the fastest growing mobile money service in Africa and one of the fastest in the world. While M-Pesa remains the largest mobile money service in Africa, the size of Nigerian market (180 million population) gave Paga the edge going forward.

One of the reasons, the company has gained over 2 million users in the last 14 months and projected by Investors King Ltd to reach 10 million user base by the end of 2018, if it successfully partner local banks by helping them bring their services to the mass market using its over 10,000 agents and simultaneously reaching wider audience through this one-stop concept.

“Our goal, as a full service payments business, is to solve the payment needs for all sizes of merchants (without competing with them), and making it easy for consumers to send money to other people or pay for goods and services,” Oviosu said.