Bizao Enters the m-Payment Market in Africa

After incubating two years at Orange, Bizao –which specialises in enabling the digital ecosystem to rely on mobile carriers’ means of payment in Africa– closed a seed funding round.

Goal: Boost the development of mobile payment in Africa.
Bizao’s main office has been implanted in Paris and they opened two subsidiaries in Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire.
Targets: content vendors doing business in Africa and local companies.
Bizao was founded by a former Orange employee, and designed a gateway linking content vendors and mobile service providers to streamline mobile payment processes.
How it works?
- Through a single contract, financial flow and API-based integration, companies and merchants may accept payments from different mobile carriers.
- The users only need a phone card (topped up beforehand) and a mobile payment account to make payments.
Business model: Bizao charges a fee on each transaction.
No information has been disclosed regarding investors or the amount of the funding series.

Bizao: Key Figures

5 markets

20 employees

100M transactions processed each month

Ending complex local payment systems. Bizao acts as a payment aggregator with a technical and commercial solution. They intend to support the digital transformation underway in Africa, removing obstacles to do with fragmentation in the telecom industry, complex negotiations, technical integration and slow payment cycles.
High ambitions. This FinTech already operates in Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Cameroon, Congo and Burkina Faso. They want to address five more markets in the near future. This funding round will help them expand their set of offers with new mobile operators. They intend to achieve 500 million in transactions by 2020.
High potential market. Bizao may rely on significant mobile penetration rates in the African countries they target. With 400 million accounts in Sub-Saharan Africa, the mobile payment sector grew by more than 40% over the past three years.

Bizao isn’t the first French player aiming for the African mobile payment market. Orange Money is successful and claims over 14 million active customers in Africa. And Société Générale launched YUP, a banking offer based on a mobile wallet.

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