It seems like every day there is a new banking innovation and these innovations seem to come with their own set of problems. It shouldn’t take more than 48 hours to get a POS machine, but some businesses have been waiting for months for a response from their banks even after spending essential capital to get the device. A customer has a simple ₦2,500 payment but their bank card is suddenly not working. You, the shop owner, decide to accept a bank transfer and the customer makes the payment but you don’t receive the payment even though they show you a debit receipt. Now a simple ₦2,500 payment turns into an argument that loses you a customer; they won’t leave without their goods and you cannot let them leave without getting a bank alert. Left and right businesses are losing money and customers due to fake alerts, slow notifications, and limited payment options. Even with multiple payment options, businesses experience difficulty reconciling their business transactions because they have collected payments on multiple platforms from bank transfers, to cash, to POS, etc. Wouldn’t it be nice to have all your business transactions from bank transfers to card transactions in one place? To be able to know how much comes in and leaves your business in one glance? Wouldn’t it be even nicer just to tap your card and make a payment like a lot of other countries do and just magically have your account debited? Swwipe is offering these solutions and more all in one platform.
Birthed in 2023 as the financial child of Parkway Holdings, Swwipe is a mobile-first payment platform for businesses. Swwipe simplifies transactions for businesses by enabling them to receive payment from their customers in person or online. All business owners need is a phone and they can receive payment via tap-to-pay, USSD, bank transfer, and card all in one activation with Swwipe.
What Swwipe offers
The platform offers a couple of mobile payment options and the ability to also integrate a personalised payment gateway on your business website to accept online payment via bank transfers, USSD, and card. To use Swwipe all you need to do is download the app on your phone, register, and link your bank account in 3 minutes and you can start receiving payments. When you register, you get a Swwipe wallet where payments you receive through the platform can be sent. Swwipe’s payment services include;
Tap-to-pay: This is the crown jewel of Swwipe. It is one of the easiest payment methods available in the market and it promises to revolutionise the way people receive payments in Nigeria. How this works is that you need a near-field communication (NFC) enabled device, an NFC-enabled card, and the Swwipe app. Once the tap-to-pay payment option is selected on the app, the customer taps their NFC-enabled card at the back of your NFC-enabled phone and holds until a prompt to input a PIN pops up. The customer then inputs their PIN and just like that, the payment goes through to your Swwipe wallet. The inverted Wi-Fi icon you see on most bank cards indicates that a card is NFC enabled. To confirm if your phone is NFC enabled, you have to check your phone settings.
Is your device not NFC-enabled? Not to worry. You can explore other payment options like bank transfer. For bank transfers, Swwipe offers two methods; either you use a fixed/static bank account or you generate a one-time/dynamic bank account for payment. Every merchant has a fixed bank account when they onboard on the Swwipe platform, so merchants can share this account number with their customers. The dynamic account number on the other hand is a unique account number generated every time the business owner requests on the app. This one-time bank transfer number changes every time you request it and expires after a few minutes. Both can be used interchangeably depending on the preference of the merchant.
If a merchant chooses the USSD option to receive payments, the Swwipe app generates a unique USSD string for the customer to use on their device. When the customer inputs the USSD code string in their phone, they’re automatically debited of the payment amount. This option can be used both in-store and online and it is a smooth and easy system with zero contact required. Let’s say you have a store on Instagram, this offers you an easy way to receive payments directly by just DMing an interested customer a USSD code.
If you are used to receiving money the traditional way, there is another option to receive payment with a customer’s card. Card payment with Pinpad can also be used to receive payments and this is done with a device called a PIN pad. A PIN pad is a small, pocket-friendly card reader that allows merchants to receive card payments by just slotting the card into the device.
To use this device, it has to be linked first to your phone via Bluetooth (the app shows instructions on how to do this when a merchant chooses this option). Once linked, the payment amount to be received will automatically display on the PIN pad, the merchant is then required to swipe the customer’s card in the PIN pad and the device asks for the customer’s PIN. The customer inputs their PIN, the payment goes through successfully, and the merchant receives an alert in seconds. Merchants can request a PIN pad at a small cost if they want this option and it’s shipped to them in 24 hours.
Swwipe also offers a Web Payment Gateway product that allows merchants or anyone else to receive payments via an e-commerce store, app, or website. Swwipe can integrate a personalised payment gateway on your business website or app to accept online payments via Bank transfers, USSD, and Card. This feature allows customers to pay on a merchant’s website or e-commerce stores with a Swwipe checkout page. This page can be customised to the merchant’s taste and payment on this page can be made via USSD, bank transfer, and card using the same procedures as stated before.
Swwipe offers a lot of value to customers through its numerous payment products that can be accessed from one dashboard. The aim of the platform is to make business payments and records easier to handle. Swwipe recognises the importance of recording cash inflows and outflows to a business and so they’ve made a dashboard that records all the counts and amounts of transactions merchants receive and shows them all this information in one glance. The dashboard on the Swwipe app includes an infographic that gives merchants quick insights into their transactions and also details of every transaction, from PIN pad, to tap-to-pay, and other methods.
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Swwipe also boasts of an impressive dispute resolution system with a clear dispute reconciliation and resolution path. In cases where a merchant has an issue with a transaction, all they have to do is go to their transaction history and click on “dispute” on that particular transaction. When this is done, a log code is created and sent to the backend and the merchant is promised a response from Swwipe within 24 hours.
Swwipe Financial Services Limited is licensed by the CBN and they are also PCI DSS certified. The company charges a subsidised fee for payments made through its platform and offers one of the best rates in the market. Wallet-to-bank transfers are free and they charge a 1% fee on USSD transactions and a 0.4% fee (capped at ₦80) for tap-to-pay, bank transfers, and PIN pad payments.
Register on Swwipe today and say goodbye to POS and payment issues and hello to contactless mobile payments, all in one place.
