Multigate.io leads the future of global payment gateway services in Africa

By Edlyn Cardoza

Multigate.io, a Nigerian financial technology company founded in 2017 that provides instant cross-border funds transfer and advanced treasury and cash management to businesses and individuals within and outside of Africa, is leading the future of FinTech and cross-border payments from the continent. The company focuses on providing simplified solutions that unravel enterprise corporates’ complex payment and cash management challenges.

The world is going digital, with digital forms of payment taking preeminence as tech advances. According to available statistics from Wordplay in a measured period, it’s been estimated that digital and mobile wallet payments accounted for 41.8% of online transaction volume worldwide. Online wallets had the highest market share in the Asia Pacific, accounting for over 58% of e-commerce payments, with that trend slowly taking up relevance in more advanced African Countries.

FinTech startups, such as Multigate.io, have not only expanded their footprint across the African continent but have increased the number of services they offer. Overall, the rapid growth of the FinTech industry is said to have benefitted many financially excluded people from Africa.

In a recent interview with a leading online financial news portal, multigate.io’s co-founder and CEO, Eghosa Nehikhare, disclosed that he founded the company after working in the venture capital industry, and he soon realised that no FinTech company provided solutions to the challenges experienced by large corporate enterprises in Nigeria (and Africa at large). It was evident that the significant FinTech companies — though very successful at it — provided solutions to SMEs and eCommerce giants, particularly in payment collections. This market [payment collections] was a red ocean for him. To this end, he decided that he wanted his company to focus on providing financial technology solutions to large enterprise corporates, mainly to simplify treasury management and cross-border payments for these organisations operating in Africa.

“This was my motivation; to solve treasury and cross-border payment challenges for large corporate enterprises (inclusive of banks and other fintechs),” he said.

The African FinTech industry has grown rapidly over the past few years, and this has caught the attention of some well-resourced venture capital (VC) firms. As expected from observers of the African FinTech scene, Nigerian FinTech startups have dominated the continent in terms of funds raised or the number of transactions performed. On this front that Multigate.io has emerged as a leader. The company has proven to be an innovative leader with its dynamic payment gateway solutions and fluid operations tools.

Within two years of operations, Multigate.io became a necessity for some of the largest pan-African companies, FinTech companies, and banks. Multigate.io became embedded in their cross-border operational fabric by solving a complex problem they all shared. So far, Multigate.io has provided FinTech treasury services with a total of $4.3 billion.

More importantly, and most excitingly, Multigate.io became the first African FinTech to be onboarded to SWIFT as a shared-platform provider to corporates (and other FinTechs). This was — and continues to be — a significant achievement for the company because it enables them to solve a major problem in cross-border payment and treasury management, which is the corporate-to-banks (i.e. one-to-many) messaging operational challenge.

Speaking about their services, Bukunmi Olufemi Demuren, the company’s other co-founder, said: “We are dedicated to helping businesses increase revenue, reduce go-to-market time and improve decision-making. Making payment processing, remittance, and cash management seamless, secure and reliable is an integral part of what we offer our clients. Our flexible payment solutions were carefully designed to adapt to the diverse needs of corporates operating in different sectors.”