Visa and Tingo Debut Super App for Africa’s Farmers

Nigerian Agri-FinTech company Tingo has teamed with Visa to launch digital payment offerings in Africa.

The partnership, announced in a Tuesday (Feb. 14) news release, is aimed at Africa’s agricultural sector and comes amid a wave of investment by Visa in the region. It includes the launch of a Tingo Visa card and the TingoPay Super App and business portal.

According to the release, the partnership gives Tingo’s subscribers access to secure cashless payments at more than 61 million merchants in more than 200 countries using Visa’s network, while helping business subscribers to accept payments from customers and other third parties.

“Given the importance of the agricultural sector to Africa’s present and future, this partnership will help to digitize the entire value chain for farmers by enabling seamless digital payments which will facilitate economic growth and support the financial inclusion agenda across the continent,” Andrew Uaboi, head of Visa’s West Africa operations, said in the release.

Tingo merged last year with Nasdaq-listed financial services provider MICT in a $900 million deal designed to help the companies expand across Africa and Asia.

MICT CEO Darren Mercer said in the release that the partnership “expands our B2B offering to SMEs across all business sectors and sees us introduce our first retail consumer offering.”

Super apps aren’t uncommon in Africa, as PYMNTS noted recently in our survey of super app trends in the EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) region.

In Africa, Jumia’s online wallet JumiaPay has evolved to become a multipurpose digital wallet that can be used across the company’s platforms and be integrated with other online sellers.

“Over the years, the wider Jumia ecosystem has grown to include the full stack of eCommerce opportunities such as groceries and rapid delivery services. And earlier this year, the company even launched a telemedicine platform in Nigeria,” PYMNTS wrote.

Visa announced last year that it would invest $1 billion in Africa to accelerate digital transformation, with plans to scale operations, deploy new technologies and deepen collaboration with its partners such as merchants, governments, financial institutions (FIs), FinTechs and mobile network operators over the next five years.

“The inclusion of mobile network operators reflects the different role Visa plays in Africa’s payment ecosystem compared to the United States,” PYMNTS wrote at the time.