China’s Tencent Leads Funding For South Africa’s Ozow In $48m Deal

The South African electronic fund transfer platform, Ozow has reportedly raised another round of funds to make its payments gateway more flexible for its customers and merchants. Ozow Series B funding is worth $48M that is led by the Chinese internet gaming company, Tencent.

Ozow is a payment gateway brand that serves as a white label payment gateway portal for third parties. The South African payment gateway seems to be unique with EFT whereby, its users can process the payment directly from their bank. Ozow’s business appears to be lucrative with enough potential to attract Tencent as its major venture capital investor.

The $48M Ozow acquired in its Series B fundraising, was led by the Chinese internet gaming company that also accompanied the likes of Endeavor Catalyst and Endeavor Harvest Fund. The Ozow platform appears to be lucrative and flexible whereby merchants and customers can access their respective internet banking services as the payment is being processed by auto.

Ozow represents a pioneer fintech company amongst others in the South African electronic fund transfer industry. Ozow has been existing since 2014 to automate electronic fund transfer that was manual at the time it was newly launched — other fintech platforms disregarded making bank payments via the internet.

Remember, Thomas Pays built the Ozow seven years again — the fintech platform agenda was to allow users to complete a payment transaction with limited clicks. “What we wanted to address was a central platform that could provide solutions to e-commerce, point of sale, e-billing, and peer to peer payment,” per Ozow’s CEO.

Potential users are mandated to have an existing bank account to utilize Ozow’s electronic fund transfer platform. Ozow has reportedly accumulated millions of banks accountable to certified holders — a bank account is expected to be linked with the users’ preferred mobile network career to automate the one-time password generated from the bank to automate a payment via Ozow.

Ozow offers an electronic fund transfer as a free service for its users — both individuals and merchants can make online payments for free, but merchants are limited to transact not more than $65,000 per month. Ozow has reportedly served the top notched companies including Vodacom, Uber, Shoprite Group, MTN, and Takealot as its pioneer customers.

Ozow’s electronic fund transfer platform is accessible to different economic sectors in South Africa. Recall the Series A fundraising that kicked off two years ago, Ozow acquired up to $2.5M to bolster its payment gateway. Thomas’s excitement about the Series B fundraising, revealed Ozow’s agenda to consort with the Rapid Payment Programme (RPP) to modify its electronic fund transfer gateway to process instant payment.