South African digital payments service provider Peach Payments has integrated with Kenyan conversational commerce and CRM platform Sukhiba to offer its South African merchants a new sales channel and facilitate WhatsApp-based sales.
Founded in Cape Town in 2012, Peach Payments provides a complete toolkit to help businesses accept, manage and disburse payments through web and mobile. It is the second largest online payment gateway in South Africa, and has also expanded to Kenya and Mauritius.
Last year, the company raised a US$31 million Series A funding round from Apis Partners to accelerate its growth across the continent and grow its product offering, and in July it acquired customer software development firm Operativa. It is now further expanding its offering by partnering Sukhiba.
Founded in 2021 by Ananth Raj Gudipati and Abhinav Reddy, Sukhiba is built on top of WhatsApp, and currently active in South Africa, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda, Nigeria, Oman and India. Used by more than 35,000 SMEs dealing directly with manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors, Sukhiba recently announced a US$1.55 million seed extension funding round to expand across Africa and other emerging markets.
“Sukhiba’s technology lets merchants add their catalogues to WhatsApp and facilitates everything from product purchases to payments to scheduling deliveries. This partnership effectively utilises Peach Payments’ platform on WhatsApp, which opens up a new sales channel for our merchants in the run-up to Black Friday and that gives their customers the flexibility of paying by card, EFT, buy-now pay-later and other alternative payment methods,” said Peach Payments CEO and founder Rahul Jain.
“We are confident that the deep knowledge and network that Peach Payments brings to this partnership will accelerate WhatsApp commerce and payments in South Africa,” said Gudipati.
Merchants sign up using the Sukhiba website and can monitor their sales on both the Sukhiba merchant app and their Peach Payments dashboard. For most merchants this will mean a daily reconciliation and transfer, while others may be on a weekly cycle.
