Nigeria is gradually coming to terms with adopting carrying out financial transactions over the internet. If you are like me, you probably have booked for your flight ticket one time or another. Seeing this development is nothing but encouraging as the world is moving towards complete mobile payment solutions.
In the Nigerian context, we have several key players in the on-line payment space namely Interswitch, eTranzact , VISA, MasterCard and a few others. Most e-commerce websites in Nigeria rely on one of these services to receive payments electronically. If you are an application developer conversant with integrating e-payment into web application, you would realize that each of the available payment platform have their requirements and criteria to get full integration status. To support multiple payment options, one needs to make several payments for the different sign-up fees to the respective payment platform. An average Interswitch integration fee for example cost about NGN150,000 (last I checked) with some bank and financial agreements stuff to sort out (terms and conditions apply). So you looking at a situation where cost of integrating every single payment platform could get pretty high. Restricting your integration due to financial constraints also limits the choices your websites visitors have to make payments.
A new player in the field of e-payment is SoftcomImagio with their new payment solution Eyowo. Eyowo is a payment platform developed and managed by SoftcomImagio. SoftcomImagio is an indigenous Nigerian company with a lot of experience in building web and mobile application. Eyowo differentiates itself by been a gateway to the other gateways. Eyowo provides a single integration point from which you can provide several payment options of the other payment platforms to your clients. In essence with Eyowo your clients can make payment with either an Interswitch,eTranzact,VISA,Master Card or Verve Cards.
What is the Eyowo Registration Fee?
Registering with Eyowo is free with a NGN 50,000 gateway setup fee with a 1% transaction charge. This means with a complete integration with Eyowo, you give your clients the choice to use any well known payment platform to make payments and for every transaction processed on Eyowo, you are only charged 1% (less expensive more cash in your pocket). Another interesting feature of Eyowo is that it claims you do not necessary need a website to make use of it. Eyowo also boast of its invoicing application and all you need to start accepting payments is to ensure your clients all have a valid email address (No big issue ).
So what does this all mean for developers?
First single integration point less headache, reduced set of criteria to satisfy since Eyowo handles all the other aspects of talking to the other gateways. Eyowo also provide REST and SOAP based web services to query your transactions. If you ask me, this is pretty cheap compared to integrating individually to the other major payment platforms. SoftcomImagio is hoping that Eyowo will be quickly adopted by developers all over the country due to its ease of entry and ready available technical support team.
If you want to know more about Eyowo, visit www.eyowo.com.
