Africa’s digital economy runs on mobile money. And for Jamie Steel, Group COO of pawaPay, that reality is not just a market observation but the company’s entire strategy.
pawaPay is a B2B payments infrastructure provider operating in more than 20 African markets. It allows businesses to connect to multiple mobile money operators across Africa through a single API.
pawaPay emerged as a spinout from a large technology business that had spent nearly a decade scaling across Africa. That parent company had solved mobile money integration internally, but every time it entered a new market, the process was painful.
“Every time you wanted to connect to a new mobile money operator, it was very, very difficult,” Steel explains. “Each operator works differently.”
Error codes vary. Timeout handling differs. Callback systems behave inconsistently. And documentation often doesn’t capture edge cases that appear only under load.
So pawaPay was created as a standalone platform focused exclusively on solving that problem. It provides businesses with a single integration point to access wallets like M-Pesa in Kenya, MTN in Uganda, Wave in Senegal and others across the continent.
Steel is clear about one thing, Kenya stands apart. “In Kenya, M-Pesa isn’t really a product. It’s a way of life.”
Unlike many markets where users cash in and cash out frequently, Kenya’s ecosystem is deeply digital. Consumers don’t simply move funds, they transact, save, borrow, and operate within an expansive mobile-first financial system.
He added that maturity makes Kenya aspirational for other markets still transitioning from cash-heavy usage patterns.
One of the more interesting insights from the interview challenges a common fintech assumption, “Scale is not just about volume. It’s about handling ambiguity.”
Modern cloud infrastructure can handle traffic spikes. That’s not the bottleneck. The real issue is how systems behave when things go wrong, especially in fragmented environments.
If a payment is authorized by a user but the confirmation callback fails, what happens? If a wallet is debited but the merchant doesn’t receive confirmation, who reconciles the transaction?
These ambiguities are what cause payment systems to collapse under pressure.
pawaPay’s core differentiator is what it calls a “direct-to-wallet” architecture. Instead of sitting on top of other payment aggregators, pawaPay connects directly to mobile money operators. That removes infrastructure layers and provides deeper visibility into how each operator behaves.
“We don’t get distracted by adding new payment channels,” Steel says. “We focus on mobile money and doing it extremely well.”
Payments are not just technical flows, they are trust events. “The minute payments stop working is the minute the product stops working,” Steel notes. “If you lose trust on a customer’s first transaction, 50% of them will never come back.”
For startups building in Africa’s digital economy, that’s a critical lesson. Payments cannot be an afterthought. They are core product infrastructure. A failed transaction is not a minor inconvenience. It is a potential customer permanently lost.
Operating across Africa means navigating vastly different regulatory environments. Rather than treating regulators as adversaries, pawaPay takes a proactive engagement approach.
“In a digital environment, regulators see what you’re doing,” Steel says. “You need to build knowledge within their organisations about how your business works.”
pawaPay has processed over 2.6 billion transactions and reports 100% platform uptime. Steel is careful to frame this not as a marketing milestone, but as proof that deep infrastructure focus matters.
The Bigger Picture
What excites Steel most is the payments infrastructure and demographics. Africa has one of the youngest populations globally. Smartphone penetration continues to grow. Data costs are falling. 4G and 5G deployments are expanding.
“All signs point to young, digitally native consumers transacting online,” he says. Mobile money has already proven it can handle scale. The next phase is digital commerce growth built on top of that foundation. And in that ecosystem, infrastructure stability may matter more than flashy product innovation.
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Also Read: Airtel Money and pawaPay Partner to Expand Cross-Border Remittance Services
