Nigerian fintech company Payaza has integrated Google Pay and Apple Pay into its payment platform, strategically positioning itself to capture a significant share of Africa’s $95 billion annual diaspora remittance market while future-proofing its infrastructure for the continent’s accelerating digital wallet adoption.
The integration, announced this week, gives Payaza’s merchants across 21 African countries immediate access to accept payments from the combined 1.4 billion users of both digital wallets worldwide.
But according to CEO Seyi Ebenezer, this move is less about chasing global payment trends and more about solving a specific friction point, which is Africans in the diaspora trying to pay businesses back home.
“Africans in the UK, US, and Canada live in these wallets,” Ebenezer explained. “When they want to support family businesses, pay for services back home, or handle remittances, they encounter friction with standard checkout forms. We have removed that.”
The timing reveals a nuanced understanding of Africa’s fragmented digital payments landscape. While Apple Pay transactions on Payaza are currently driven primarily by diaspora and international customers (since Apple hasn’t fully opened local card issuance in most African markets), Google Pay already functions as a domestic payment tool.
Since 2023, Nigerian Verve and Mastercard holders have been able to add their cards to Google accounts, making Google Pay a live, local-to-local payment option today.
This dual capability positions Payaza uniquely. For Google Pay, there’s immediate domestic and international value. For Apple Pay, it’s about capturing diaspora inflows now while waiting for inevitable local wallet expansion across the continent.
The integration supports three specific use cases across Payaza’s markets including diaspora remittances, inbound cross-border commerce (such as a Lagos designer selling to London customers), and infrastructure readiness for merchants expanding beyond Africa.
“If a Kenyan SaaS company or a Nigerian hotelier cannot accept Apple Pay, they lose the sale,” Ebenezer noted. “We are solving for the merchant who wants to earn foreign exchange.”
The announcement comes during a period of remarkable growth for Payaza, which has distinguished itself in Africa’s fintech ecosystem through financial discipline rather than venture capital burn rates.
In October 2024, the company redeemed ₦20.3 billion ($13.5 million) in commercial paper obligations entirely from internal cash flow. This is an unusual feat in a sector where most competitors are subsidising growth with investor capital.
“Does profitability slow us down? No. It makes us anti-fragile,” Ebenezer said. “While others were burning VC cash to subsidise growth that evaporated when the incentives stopped, we focused on unit economics and velocity. We don’t need to raise a Series B to keep the lights on.”
That financial independence has enabled Payaza to build what Ebenezer calls “the fortress“, a regulatory and technical infrastructure that includes being the only certified Visa processor in sub-Saharan Africa, holding money services business licences across all 50 U.S. states and Canada, and operating in 21 countries with partnerships with both Visa and Mastercard.
The company’s relative obscurity until now was intentional. “In the payment business, if you are famous too early, it’s usually for the wrong reasons (downtime, fraud, or scandal),” Ebenezer explained.
“We spent the last few years securing licences in 21 countries and becoming the only certified Visa processor in the region. We wanted the infrastructure to be bulletproof before we turned on the spotlight.”
Founded in 2021, Payaza has earned investment-grade credit ratings from three major agencies and was recently named a Money2020 Awards finalist. The company also secured approval from Nigeria’s Securities and Exchange Commission in July 2025 to raise an additional ₦20 billion under its commercial paper programme.
For merchants using Payaza, the Google Pay and Apple Pay integration requires no additional technical work and is automatically available through the platform’s existing API and merchant dashboard.
