TrustPay wants to bridge the disparate islands in the mobile payments space

The mobile payments space is booming. In Africa, pioneering systems like MPesa are still going strong, while the likes of Snapscan and FlickPay are gaining traction among smartphone owners. Internationally meanwhile, the entrance of Aplle into the space is only likely to accelerate acceptance and innovation. For the most part however, the various apps used remain fairly disparate and, in many cases, limited by national borders. A new play by Cape Town-based company TrustPay is looking to change that.

Aimed at emerging markets, TrustPay claims to be able to connect merchants and consumers to one another through the assimilation of all traditional and ‘exotic’ payment systems, into one cohesive platform.

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That’s pretty big, given that exotic (non-traditional) payments, such as mobile money (like MPesa), street cash vouchers (eg 484 in Nigeria) or even highly localised payment systems like Boleto in Brazil, are for the most part, not available to international merchants by law and nor do they use major currencies like Euro or US Dollar.

If TrustPay’s to be believed, it’s managed to resolve that by “pooling vast numbers of merchants”, allowing them to manage compliance, settle collections and to connect to local payment sources.

The system is via an API, which it says can be integrated into pretty much any payment system. This, it says, means that merchants can now easily accept payment from any type of customer, (consumer or business), who can choose a variety of local payment methods in which to settle the transaction.

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TrustPay also says that its system enables small and large organisations access to a multitude of payment types without the need for costly individual set-up and maintenance costs.

“We have worked across Africa for a number of years and witnessed the growth of different types of cashless payment systems. We realised there was a need for a common-denominator platform that could provide a simple but effective exchange between all the parties for trade and settlement,” says TrustPay co-founder Sean Condé.

Available globally, TrustPay has chosen to focus much of its efforts on emerging markets, largely because of the diverse number of payments systems available in these countries. In the EMEA region, the company is operational in several countries, including Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Niger, DRC, Mali, Tanzania, South Africa, Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Turkey, UAE with further territories including Ghana in the pipeline.

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In South America meanwhile, it’s established a partnership with Brazil’s biggest end-to-end payment system, EBANX.

It’s not just involved in the mobile payments spaces though.

In South Africa for example, its application and service is on offer to a broad range of eCommerce and MCommerce site developers and businesses. It also has agreements with a number of municipality suppliers that are now able to offer their consumers the option to pay for their utilities via a payment method of their choice.

It also claims that its API can easily be integrated into ecommerce and mCommerce platforms, including WooCommerce and Opencart.