South African mobile payments platform, Nomanini, has reported a growth of over 1 500% over 20 months, spurred by its expansion into other African markets.

Nomanini provides business insights to merchant aggregators through its cloud-based platform, as well as the means to sell different types of services electronically to micro-entrepreneurs in informal markets.

At the end of 2015, Nomanini launched its second product for informal markets, called eLula, which provides enterprise prepaid distributors with more sophisticated business insights as well as management tools.

The company recorded one million transactions in August 2014, and 16 million have taken place since then.

“Much of this growth has been focused on Mozambique, Ghana and South Africa, and has been achieved against a backdrop of 99.9% uptime,” the company said in a statement.

“This kind of growth is the result of our partnership model and the way in which we enter new markets by ensuring we have expert local partners on the ground. Much of this growth is focused on two or three partners, and it has proven that we can deliver a scalable platform  by combining world-class technology with local expertise,” added Nomanini CEO, Vahid Monadjem.

In March this year, the company announced it had partnered with Mozambique Mobile Solutions to integrate its solution with M-Pesa in the south eastern African country, to allow merchants to use mobile money agents to top up their virtual vending accounts on Nomanini’s point of sale terminals.

“As we deploy more and more terminals, merchants are referring them to other merchants. It is becoming less about training people to use something new, and more about showing them something they have already heard good things about,” Monadjem said.

“There’s a latent demand for this kind of technology and this kind of service. People want this and are ready to take it up. But you need the right partners, the right people, and the right value proposition,” he said.

[Image – Nomanini]