Nigeria’s Traction Apps, a payments company with solution offerings around PoS, USSD and bank transfer, is providing a one-stop-shop management tool to run businesses, whether online or offline.
Founded in August 2020, Traction Apps is an aggregated payments platform for SMEs, with additional management tools including inventory, invoicing and point of sale. The goal is to help SMEs to run and grow their businesses.
“Traction Apps is essentially building the Square for Africa,” Dolapo Adejuyigbe, the startup’s co-founder, told Disrupt Africa.
To date, the startup has deployed its solution to over 1,000 clients, including SoFresh, Kuddy Cosmetics, Nuli, Studio 24 and Mypharmacy. Adejuyigbe said it had identified a significant gap that needed filling.
“Several tech platforms are currently pushing online payment, however regarding offline or in-person payment, there still exists a gap to be filled as with card payments there is still a major time lag in getting PoS terminals, a high rate of declined transactions, and delayed confirmation of bank transfer payments and fraud alerts,” he said.
“Traction tries to fix these through same-day settlement – by designing location-specific solutions for merchants to address connectivity linked payment issues, making available full details of payments and verification of each transaction, allowing for easy reconciliation.”
While there has been a wave of innovation in the SME space around payments, e-commerce, and supply chain and inventory management, this has driven SMEs to use multiple solutions without being able to aggregate data. With Traction Apps, these solutions are aggregated on one app that allows for various types of payment, while SMEs can also manage inventory, create an online store, and keep records of customers and sales.
“This makes the life of business owners much easier and business operations smoother,” said Adejuyigbe.
Traction Apps concluded a pre-seed funding round last year, which was led by a local VC, and has seen transaction volume grow by an average of 3.5 times month-on-month since its launch.
“Currently we are focused in Nigeria. Our product is an emerging market product, and so we have our eyes set on expanding to other countries on the continent and in the Middle East,” said Adejuyigbe.
The startup, which makes money through transaction fees and software subscription, launched operations in the middle of the pandemic, which Adejuyigbe said was “tricky” but also had its benefits.
“That experience has been helpful in figuring out how to leverage multiple platforms to engage customers,” he said.
