Payments platform now has 5 million users

Tayo Oviosu, founder and CEO of Paga, the online payments platform, announced yesterday that the company now has 5 million users on its service.

Oviosu had created Paga as a way of solving the inefficiency of payments in Nigeria for both businesses and consumers - and he began that journey seven years ago.

While seven years may seem too long in a country of 180 million people, especially with all the clamour for financial inclusion, but it takes a lot of effort and courage to take on such a sector of the Nigerian market.

When you consider the problems that the Nigerian business environment poses to startups, you realise that it is not easy to make it - by any metric. Oviosu agrees as well, admitting that Paga didn't really start operations until after the company secured Series A funding.

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It took Paga 13 months to get a license, with Oviosu also saying that about 1 million users have joined Paga in the last 8 months.

"So, technically, we really started our major push of Paga in September of 2012. At the time of the fundraise we had 125,000 users," he says.

As at June 2015, Paga had hit 3 million users which took 3 years to achieve. Within the next 14 months, the platform was able to gain another 2 million users leading to a total of five million which it now has.

"Despite the macro situation in Nigeria we continue to grow at a strong pace. From Jan 2012-June 2015 (42 months) we processed US$1bn. The next 12 months, July 2015-July 2016, we processed over US$800m," Oviosu says in a medium post.

Achieving these numbers are no small feat and props have to be given to Tayo Oviosu and the guys at Paga.