Egypt-based payments group enza has entered the African payments market, focusing on the needs of banks, fintechs, and MNOs across the continent. enza focuses on providing native digital payments capabilities to service institutions that want to enable their customers to accept or make electronic payments, a space that was previously dominated by banks, but is increasingly served by MNOs, fintechs, and government entities.

enza’s platform is a token-based, cloud-native, and API-first system that is provided with an open development environment that expedites integration and improves technical flexibility. The African payments ecosystem The African consumer payments landscape remains dominated by cash, with global management consulting firm McKinsey estimating that only 5% to 7% of all payment transactions in Africa are made via electronic or digital channels. As a result, McKinsey anticipates that between 2020 and 2025, the electronic payments market in Africa will grow by around 150%.

The group’s officials stated that they have created enza because so many payments challenges remain unsolved across the African continent. Their focus is on creating a seamless digital fabric between the payments’ channels, schemes, integrations etc. so that enza enables clients to access anything they need, even if enza doesn’t provide the service natively.

enza has the advantage of having no legacy technology or processes that needs modernising, but rather a blank canvass on which it could architect a modern, third generation payments service built from the first principles to be digital, open, and agile. Agility is not something that can be retrofitted onto legacy systems or operations. The group’s team is growing rapidly with a new corporate office being opened in Cairo, Egypt by the middle of January 2023.

The company has attracted a board with considerable experience in banking, payments, and the African geography. .