Pan-African payments startup Nomanini revealed on Monday that, over the past 20 months, it has seen 1 500% growth in transactions on its mobile point-of-sale (PoS) platform for informal markets.
Founded in 2010, Nomanini has designed a payments platform, which provides merchant aggregators with sophisticated business insights via a cloud-based platform, and merchants and micro-entrepreneurs in informal markets with the means to sell different types of services electronically and create a sustainable income.
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Having hit one million transactions in August 2014, the company has seen growth of 1 500 percent since then, and recently saw the 16 millionth transaction take place on its platform.
According to the release, much of the growth is as a result of its efforts in Mozambique, Ghana and South Africa, and has been achieved against a backdrop of 99.99% uptime.
Nomanini CEO, Vahid Monadjem believes that the explosive growth is a validation of the company’s business model and its ability to provide a valuable, relevant and efficient product at scale.
“This kind of growth is the result of our partnership model and the way in which we enter new markets by ensuring we have expert local partners on the ground. Much of this growth is focused on two or three partners, and it has proven that we can deliver a scalable platform by combining world-class technology with local expertise,” says Monadjem.
“To have achieved such growth with almost 100 percent uptime also demonstrates the maturity of the product and the infrastructure around it. Reaching such a landmark number of transactions would mean nothing if there were periods when merchants were unable to use the platform and the fact that it is available to them all the time means it is a product they can trust.”
It’s probably no accident that Nomanini’s recent growth spurt follows a major pivot, and a number additions to its product portfolio.
At the end of last year the company launched its second generation product for informal markets – eLula – providing enterprise prepaid distributors with more sophisticated business insights as well as management tools.
Earlier this year, the company announced it had integrated with M-Pesa in Mozambique, enabled via its local country partner, Mozambique Mobile Solutions (MMS), to allow merchants to use mobile money agents to top up their virtual vending accounts on Nomanini’s PoS terminals.
Monadjem said that continuing to hone the product was vital as Nomanini looks to serve merchants in informal markets. “As we deploy more and more terminals, merchants are referring them to other merchants. It is becoming less about training people to use something new, and more about showing them something they have already heard good things about.
