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BoundlessPay, a Nigeria-focused payment platform, is working on an offline payment system that will benefit the unbanked population.

According to CEO Franklin Peters, the company plans to expand its user-base by offering payment channels that use SMS and email verification. This will speak to those who do not have access to smartphones or constant Internet. The new version of the application is expected to go live by Q2, 2023.

BoundlessPay offers its users a platform to buy, sell, and hold cryptocurrencies through its mobile phone applications both on Android and iOS. It also enables users to send cryptocurrencies to other users through its peer-to-peer (P2P) service, making remittance easy and cost effective.

Boundless Pay Ecosystem

“In our future rollout, if you don’t have a smartphone, a person can pay money to your phone number or email and get a code for withdrawal,” Peters told in an interview with NODO News. Recipients can then cash out through the bank of their choice or BoundlessPay agents. The company plans to increase its agent base from the current 20 to 1,000 as it rolls out its next phase.

“So, it (payment) doesn’t need to go through the National Payment System (NPS),” he says. NPS is the technology that Nigerian banks use to wrap their payments. “This allows us to offer a wide variety of options to our users, while still ensuring that there’s never a downtime in payment processing and settlement.”

(Interface of BoundlessPay’s platform. Photo/BoundlessPay)

BoundlessPay’s innovation around offline payments bridges the financial inclusion gap in the Sub-Saharan Africa, where 55% of people still didn’t have access to a bank account in 2021, according to the World Bank.

“On average, only 5% to 7% of all payment transactions in Africa were made via electronic or digital channels, compared to 50% or more in Turkey, for instance,” a McKinsey report on Future of Payments in Africa.

The growth towards digital payments is likely to be uneven across the continent, the report says. Overall it will depend on infrastructure readiness, e-commerce penetration, mobile-money penetration, and regulation, among other factors, in each market.

How Remittance Pain Gave Way to BoundlessPay

“It’s been a long-standing mission to solve a problem around payment, settlement, and remittances,” Peters says. His experience with the old, time-consuming and expensive remittance services egged him on to look for other ways to send and receive money.

“I came across Bitcoin in 2015, by helping someone remit a million dollars using Bitcoin. I spent just about $1 in fees for that transaction. It was an eye-opener,” he narrates. BoundlessPay was created under Boundless Nexus in 2019 but went live in 2021.

The CEO confirmed that BoundlessPay is serving more than 14,000 users, mostly in Nigeria.

The firm is also targeting commerce transactions for business cases by introducing tools to settle payments in the upcoming version.

It is currently working on a new version of its app to include invoicing, payment links, and bulk payments, according to Peters. The application will be a unified platform for payment tools as opposed to the siloed manner most payment apps do.

-Edited by Faustine Ngila / Photo by BoundlessPay