Tazanian fintech startup NALA has integrated its global payment service, Apple Pay, into its payment solutions.
The fintech company has over the years proven its dominance in East Africa and has now taken it to a higher level by taking a bold step into the fintech space on the continent while enabling its African expatriate users to make direct local payments.
NALA has now announced that its busy users can now, with Apple Pay, make payments from the UK and US.
NALA’s new breakthrough is a testament to its stated plan to enable seamless and “lightning-fast” repayment for Africa.
Developed by Apple Inc, Apple Pay is an advanced mobile payment system that digitizes card payments, while optimizing for contactless in-store payments. The payment service with more than 45 million users in the US alone allows easy transactions to many people in the US and UK, and most of its users as well.
The latest integration with NALA’s Apple Play comes after the African fintech company launched in early 2022 at an event in New York its operations in the United States, attended by six members of the Tanzanian parliament.
NALA founder and CEO, Benjamin Fernandez, emphasized in a statement that the company’s recent moves are designed to connect the African continent with global payment options, even as it builds a rich financial infrastructure for Africans.
NALA’s mission is to increase economic opportunities for Africans globally; Enabling Apple Pay is a step towards connecting more global payment options to Africa. This extension allows us to build a stronger financial infrastructure for Africans around the world,” he said.
NALA customers in the UK and US will be able to access the new Apple Play feature through the NALA app, effectively enabling the feature to pay for over 300 banks and 20 mobile money players in Africa.
Only a handful of African fintech companies have been able to successfully integrate Apple Pay into their products and systems, and NALA’s latest move is seen as putting it ahead of its contemporaries. Another African-based fintech company, Flutterwave, promised its users in February of this year that it would integrate Apple Pay into its suite of payment options, but Nigerian fintech has yet to roll out the service.
NALA told her Roadmap for their products It will be affordable, because it assumes that it will move to improve how Africans, both at home and in the diaspora, experience fintech services.
