Like many founders in the African mobile money space, PawaPay CEO Nikolai Barnwell sees endless opportunities for growth as people increasingly embrace mobile money as a safer and more efficient alternative to cash.
“There are very few things that you can do with mobile money that you can’t do with cash,” Barnwell told PYMNTS in an interview. “On the flip side, there are more and more things that you cannot do with cash that you can do with mobile money because cash is expensive. Businesses don’t like to handle cash, cash gets stolen, cash gets lost,” he said.
His U.K.-based and Africa-focused payments company recently secured $9 million in a seed funding round to help expand in new markets across Africa, where “there’s a very strong ask for a reliable and transparent mobile money gateway” from both global and pan-African merchants.
But with over 200 live mobile money systems on the continent, it remains a difficult sector to cover because of how fragmented and opaque African markets are.
He referenced the challenges a global freelancer platform…
