United Bank for Africa (UBA) Plc and MFS Africa, have partnered to offer innovative and timely solutions to a wide range of customers, especially in the area of remittances, electronic money services, SME payments, as well as integration to businesses for cross border payments.
These services are expected to cover the 20 African countries where UBA have branches.
The countries are Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Côte d’Ivoire, Zambia, Tanzania, Uganda, Republic of Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Gabon, Guinea, Liberia, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Mali and Senegal.
The agreement signed in Lagos recently heralds the start of a partnership that will be fundamental to leveraging MFS Africa’s digital payment hub that connects over 400 million mobile money users to a wide range of partners including mobile money operators, money transfer organisations, fintechs, enterprise merchants, and others, to drive distribution of financial services.
Speaking at the event held at the UBA headquarters, the bank’s group deputy managing director, Mr. Muyiwa Akinyemi, expressed his excitement at the plethora of offerings that UBA customers will enjoy from the partnership.
“We are very pleased to be partnering with MFS Africa in this venture that will see us offering seamless digital solutions to most of the financial challenges of our customers.
“UBA is ready and with the value that MFS Africa is known for we are indeed set to dominate the entire banking space in Africa,” he said.
He said the partnership will help to boost an array of services including a centralised payment hub that enables cross-border payments across multiple rails through a single integration, inbound and outbound cross border remittances; SME payments digitization, domestic and cross border corporate disbursements, Remittance Africa-China corridor; bin sponsorship and web acquiring.
For his part, the founder and CEO of MFS Africa, Mr. Dare Okoudjou said, “As the payments landscape in Africa continues to evolve, we believe that fintechs and banks need to have a deeper collaboration in expanding opportunities that will help ease remittance, payments, disbursements and collections for businesses and their consumers across all sectors of the economy in Africa.
“This is why we are delighted to welcome UBA as our new pan-African banking partner. We are aware of the strengths and capabilities of UBA which is why we will be working together towards expanding access to more possibilities for millions of African consumers and businesses across the 20 countries they are present in Africa,” he said.
UBA is a leading pan-African financial institution, offering banking services to more than thirty-seven million customers across 1,000 business offices and customer touch points in 20 African countries.
It also has presence in New York, London, Paris now the United Arab Emirates.
MFS Africa, on the other hand, connects over 400 million mobile wallets and enables merchant payment, bulk payment, bank-to-wallet transfers, and an array of other cross border digital payments services.
