Nkiruka Odinkemelu

Nigeria’s leading mobile money operator, Paga, has announced its acquisition of Apposit, a technology company based in Addis Ababa. 

The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Paga, Tayo Oviosu, said the acquisition followed his announcement after the firm’s $10 million rise in growth financing in 2018. He said thec company had begun exploring opportunities in other economies similar to Nigeria in efforts to build a global emerging market payments powerhouse. Oviosu said the relationship between the two firms was not new, as Apposit has dedicated an engineering team to the company since 2009, led by Eric Chijioke, who is also Paga’s chief technology officer.

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“Our favorite motto at Paga is that we go farther together as a team, and this is exemplified in our decision to take our trusted business relationship with Apposit one step further and have it fully become a part of the Paga family. By doing so, we not only gain a scalable world-class internal engineering team, but, we also are in a stronger position to grow our global payments business. “Last year, we refined our mission and vision to birth our massive transformative purpose to make it simple for one billion people to access and use money.” Apposit has demonstrated strong alignment with our purpose and they have some of the very best engineers I have been privileged to work with, in over two decades in technology, in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. I am very excited to have Apposit join the Paga team,” said the Paga boss.

Its global vision has led Paga to pinpoint Ethiopia as one of the viable countries with similar cash and payment problems identified in Nigeria and introduce its services to the market. Acquiring Apposit provides Paga with an instant go-to-market strategy to launch the Paga service in Ethiopia, under the vast experience and leadership of Adam Abate, Apposit co-founder & CEO, who will now become the CEO of Paga Ethiopia. The company will now also own Apposit’s other in-house technology products, Terra and Tangio.