South Africa's MultiChoice Group, usually best-known for video entertainment provision, has announced a joint venture, along with fintech company Rapyd and investor General Catalyst, aimed at developing an integrated payment platform for Africa. The joint venture will operate as a new company, called Moment.
Moment is to offer expanded payment infrastructure for businesses across Africa to help them collect and make payments more easily, quickly, and affordably in any manner that their buyers or suppliers prefer. Moment will also offer additional options for consumers to spend and save money more wisely. The aim is to transform the African payments landscape by making digital payments more accessible and reliable for domestic, cross-border and global payments.
Moment will consolidate the US$3.5 billion in payments that the MultiChoice Group processes annually to expand options for subscribers and make payment processes more efficient, as well as to extend Africa’s most complete payment network to African and global businesses.
The long-term plan is to provide the infrastructure for pan-African payments for the 44 million small businesses operating on the continent. It is also to turn the 90% of retail transactions that are currently taking place in cash into digital payments. Moment aims to make digital transactions more accessible to the 350 million consumers that are underbanked or not banked at all.
Some of Moment’s long-term service offerings include payments across more than 40 countries in Africa through over 200 locally preferred payment methods, and driving adoption of PayShap, TCIB, NQR, and other real-time payment methods across all markets.
The offerings also include global-Africa trade for importers and exporters with virtual accounts in more than 40 currencies and local payments in more than 130 countries, along with payment tools and financial services for micro-entrepreneurs and SMEs. Moment will also offer consumers payments, savings and rewards.