Tayo Oviosu, founder and Chief Executive Officer of Paga, a mobile payment company, on Thursday in Lagos said the firm had processed over 335 million transactions worth N14 trillion since inception.

Oviosu said this at a media parley to celebrate the firm’s 15 years anniversary

He said that 80 per cent of the total transactions was done in five years.

“We have been around for 15 years, but there’s a huge growth and acceleration and our transactions have grown more than when we celebrated 10 years.

“Between 10 years and now, we have grown our transaction value seven times more and volume five times.”

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According to him, when Paga started it had no structure, but now operates platform as a service and serves over 250 businesses.

Oviosu said that Paga would continue building an ecosystem that enables people to digitally send, receive money and access financial services.

Speaking on other achievements, Oviosu said that Paga had empowered people by creating jobs across Nigeria and Africa as a whole.

According to him, Paga has created 1,000 direct jobs and over 100,000 indirect jobs, which is economy empowerment for Nigeria.

“Our first market has been Nigeria, a country of over 200 million people with over 90 per cent of transactions done in cash.

“Though the company started in April 2009, we took our services to market in August 2012. It took us 25 months to get our licence from the Central Bank of Nigeria, and then another seven months to close our series A financing.

“We started just as an agent network, but now we operate three lines of business which includes consumer business with 23 million users, retail business and infrastructure which services businesses.”

Oviosu said the Nigerian payment landscape is very competitive because it is a very attractive market as shaown in its over 335 million transactions. He, however, noted that there is a huge opportunity for every player to create a niche and acquire customers.

“The regulator has made very clear the categorization and that has attracted a lot of competitors. And that’s a good thing. We don’t look at that as a bad thing because it also keeps us on our toes.

“And so all the competitors are a bit different in how they do things. I think our market is very similar to India. I don’t think it’s a winner-takes-all because there is no one person in Nigeria that has only one financial account. I’ve not met the Nigerian who has only one account. So, it’s not a winner-takes-all, but you probably have one that you prefer,” he said.

Speaking on the challenges the company has faced over the years, the Paga identified dearth of fund as a major issue, especially at the inception of the business.

The Paga CEO said “When I started Paga, there was no angel investors, there was no tech ecosystem because nobody was doing anything at that time. So, when you are going out to pitch to investors, you are not just going out to pitch Paga, you have to pitch the story of Nigeria. And that was very hard because of the macro issues in Nigeria, so that was a real challenge.”