An Ethiopian fintech startup, Chapa, has launched an online payment gateway that enables businesses to accept payments from people worldwide. Chapa makes it possible for businesses and organizations to accept any local or international digital payment method from anywhere on the globe. Any current digital platform may include its payment APIs.
According to co-founder and CEO Nael Hailemariam, “Chapa’s goal is to enable Ethiopian company owners and entrepreneurs to prosper in the international market.” “This launch firmly marks our entrance into Ethiopia’s financial sector, and we anticipate growing our footprint in the digital ecosystem growth throughout East Africa in phase two and the rest of Africa in phase three.” By affecting critical national concerns, we have been able to show our effect in a short amount of time. We anticipate keeping up our dialogue with different stakeholders and advancing our CSR objective.
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What Services does Chapa Offer?
Chapa was made after the National Bank of Ethiopia opened the fintech industry to tech companies in 2020. Out of more than a dozen companies that sought a payment gateway license over the previous two years, Chapa was the third to get approval from NBE, after ArifPay and SunPay.
Nael Hailemariam and Israel Goytom started the company. Both of them have worked in the IT industry in Asia, Europe, and North America. It has also hired several advisers from companies, including JP Morgan, Google, and LinkedIn, with diverse experience. Chapa is focusing on the African market and its goal of helping and integrating 100,000 entrepreneurs and firms into the global economy by 2025.
Along with offering its merchants metrics, data, and analytics to assist them in gaining insight into their business operations and making data-driven choices, Chapa also provides its high-volume processors with a discount on the transaction charge. Recall that Chapa joined the Mila-Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institution, the most prominent deep learning institute in the world, last month. Because of this relationship, Chapa is able to improve its research in the fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning. This helps Chapa make it easier for SMEs and companies to get access to financial services.
Chapa also wants to use its past projects as a starting point for its current activities. In order to earn $300,000 for the Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, Chapa founded MyGerd.com last year in cooperation with Ethiopian Electric Power (EEP), Flutterwave, and Zemen Bank (GERD).
The company then launched Eyezon in November 2021 with the help of the Ethiopian Diaspora Agency (EDA) and the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia. This brought in more than USD 6 million for Ethiopians who had been forced to move within their own country and for health institutions that had been destroyed by violence (CBE).
Chapa has built and bought holy-grail tools, techniques, and methods to ensure that our high-tech fixes are good for our customers. Chapa’s main goal is to solve problems with payments and transactions that are common in developing countries, especially in East Africa. It only made sense to develop an informal way of pronouncing “money” in order to engage with the young on a more profound but lighthearted level. It was for this reason that the moniker “Chapa” was born. A group of Ethiopian engineers, researchers, and entrepreneurs founded the company in 2020, with its headquarters there.