Digitizing Governments Boosts Business Trade, Digital Payments Across Africa

In lists of technology innovations and developments across West Africa, we usually see the achievements of the usual suspects: Nigeria, Ghana and sometimes Cote d’Ivoire.

But one country that is making great strides in the sub-region is Senegal, a leader in information technology (IT) and IT-enabled services (ITeS) that has made the digital economy a key priority of the nation’s development strategy.

It is obvious that many private sector players have contributed to this achievement, one of them being GAINDE 2000, an IT solutions provider that facilitates trade procedures for governments and businesses.

“What we’ve been trying to do for the last two decades, since GAINDE 2000 was created in 2002, is to facilitate [trade] relationships between businesses and governments in different African countries,” Daniel Sarr, the company’s regional executive director, told PYMNTS in an interview.

In 2004, the firm launched ORBUS, a platform designed to facilitate trade through a “single window” system by giving businesses access to a set of services, including a single portal that integrates payment methods across 35 African countries. The company is also one of the suppliers of electronic signatures approved by the National Association of Accountants and Chartered Accountants (ONECCA) in Senegal.

Digitizing Payments to Improve Trade

Sarr said the issue in Africa’s fragmented markets are the multiple regulations, laws and standards that businesses are struggling to comply with, even if they’re acting in good faith.

And this is where GAINDE 2000 comes in to help overcome this friction, providing a digital platform that streamlines all the paperwork associated with importing goods, enabling businesses to cut through the red tape and avoid the heavy bureaucracy often associated with the process.

The company is doing well so far, Sarr said, using the annual results of the World Bank Doing Business study as evidence that it is helping to stimulate business growth on the continent, and particularly in Senegal. The French-speaking country moved 100 places up in the cross-border trade indicator, from 163 to 61 globally, between 2010 and 2013, which Sarr said is one of the most “impressive results” achieved.

He noted that payments were the last part of the process when providing platforms to governments, which often attract most of the payment flows in any country — and it was only natural to digitize payment processes to make them more efficient.

As a result, the company entered into a 5-year partnership with Kenya-based multinational payments company Cellulant last month, offering governments and businesses an end-to-end technology infrastructure and payments solutions for trade, revenue and tax collection.

Cellulant will provide a single digital payments platform — Tingg — that will make it easier to collect payments across 150-plus payment options in different currencies, helping to reduce the time and cost involved in trade transactions.

Africa’s Digital Evolution

Sarr said the African region is undergoing a major digital transformation, driven by growing mobile phone penetration and mobile technology.

Electronic payments have also emerged as a key pillar of that digital revolution and “a major growth driver that any key player in the digital world cannot ignore,” he said, adding that analysts estimate the sector will be worth more than $40 billion in 2025, a 66% increase compared to 2021 figures.

And after telecommunication companies spearheaded the development of mobile wallets, we are seeing the explosion of local FinTech firms that are “creating new services and new value,” Sarr said. As an example, he named the popular Senegal-based mobile money provider, Wave, which is solving “a Senegalese problem” for its users.

Sarr further dismissed the idea that global apps like WhatsApp could become more dominant than mobile wallets, noting that local businesses providing local solutions will have an edge over global firms. “I’m not saying that global platforms like WhatsApp Pay or others would not succeed in the long term, but I think the ones that will have a leading role in Africa are those that will build solutions around local context. And for now, it’s mostly local players that are doing that job,” he remarked.

On using cryptocurrencies in cross-border payments, Sarr acknowledged the huge potential in that space, which is why GAINDE 2000 has launched a project to determine how virtual currencies can be used to make payments and facilitate the conversion of local currencies.

Limiting Frictions With Electronic Signatures

Moving forward, Sarr said the company will continue to focus on developing innovative platforms to help governments more efficiently complete their processes. And going into 2022, its key priority will be launching B2B platforms to expand their electronic signatures business, which has grown more than 400%, to other countries in the region.

“We developed one [electronic signature] here in Senegal that the government has been using for the last five years. We are dominating the market [now], and we plan to accelerate our development in other countries like Cote d’Ivoire and Kenya,” he said.

Sarr added that most African countries have been slow in regulating electronic signatures — but others, like Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Togo and Benin, have taken the lead in implementing new regulations, which will pave the way for new business deals.

“As an African player, we’re ready for all of these opportunities, and that’s why [electronic signatures] remain a key priority for us,” he said.