Well it’s live…ish.
I just ordered a…hmm, never mind what. I completed a transaction on Konga.com, and the Konga Pay (or K-Pay?) payment option wasn’t there, so I’m guessing they didn’t flip the switch just yet. BUT, I am reliably informed that the online store’s proprietary payment method which we reported discovering in April got the green light, and is ready to go.
What’s Konga Pay? Konga Pay is a secure payment method that will allow its customers pay for stuff without using debit cards. It works by Konga’s ecommerce technology integrating with the internet banking portals of major Nigerian banks. We’re not sure which banks as of now, but we’ll find out eventually.
This is what Konga Pay should look like during checkout.
From my earlier article about K-Pay, which you should really read to get the full picture of how Konga Pay could change the game.
“KongaPay is the result of a partnership with leading banks in Nigeria, which will make it possible for their customers to link their Konga accounts directly to their bank accounts. What is more, the integration is so tight that KongaPay will work regardless of whether or not said customers have internet banking enabled on their accounts or not.
It is not clear how long this has been in the offing, but this move to disintermediate card payments, with the help of banks has clearly been in the making since 2014, when Konga first announced a payment feature that would let GTBank customers pay for their purchases via a bank transfer that would be initiated from right inside the Konga.com checkout cart. If a user elects to pay via GTBank, they are redirected to the bank’s internet banking portal, which on the user’s login populates the forms with the amounts due. Once the transfer is made, the customer is sent back to Konga.com, completing the purchase.
KongaPay however changes the game entirely in that asides from doing away with cards entirely, the user will never even see an internet banking portal. After a one time integration, all a customer with a linked bank account need do is click the checkout button, enter a one-time password, and boom.”
I thought Konga Pay was likely to launch in May 2015, but I was off by a one week. Like I said, this could change things significantly. We’ll see how customers, as well as the rest of the payments ecosystem react.
