Mobile payment provider dials up deal with African telecoms giant

Birmingham-based mobile payment provider PM Connect has landed a major contract with Africa’s biggest mobile carrier, marking a major milestone in the company’s global expansion.

The partnership with Vodacom, which has a 43% market share in South Africa alone, will see PM Connect expand its roll-out of mobile-payment-enabled sports and entertainment subscription services for international clients, including wrestling giant WWE, to Africa for the first time.

The deal builds on PM Connect’s growing presence in the African market built over the past two years.

PM Connect’s mobile payment technology allows consumers to pay for lifestyle and sport content, videos and articles through carrier billing in a few clicks, adding any purchases directly to their phone bill. This allows all customers, regardless of their banking facilities, to carry out quick and easy on-the-go purchases.

Chris Purdie, group commercial director at PM Connect, said:“This marks a key step for PM Connect as continued expansion into the African market features heavily in our ongoing growth plans. We’re looking forward to helping our clients access new audiences through the provision of quality sporting entertainment, and boosting accessibility of products and services for consumers. At present, our deal with Vodacom focuses on South Africa, the continent’s highest GDP country, but our sights are set on a widespread roll-out across the continent.”

He added: “With the African carrier billing payments market set to triple in the next five years, growth in the continent is a key opportunity not only to drive revenue, but to introduce global brands to entirely new audiences. As a Birmingham-based business, our growing presence in Africa allows us to act as a spearhead for technological excellence on a global scale, enabling us to provide more opportunities here in the local economy.”

“Our new contract with Vodacom will provide us with a firm position in the African market, while offering a unique selling point to our clients in a region where mobile phone use for billing is set to soar and credit and debit card adoption remains low. Our mobile payment solutions will be crucial for global brands to succeed in markets that are otherwise difficult to monetise.”

This latest partnership follows a series of successes for PM Connect, including a contract win with the NBA and inclusion in the Sunday Times Hiscox Times Tech Track 100 – which ranks the 100 British tech companies with the highest growing sales – for the second year running.

The business currently processes around two million payments a month, with the Vodacom deal part of a period of growth that has seen staff double in the last 18 months and a 59% increase in turnover over the past three years, now at £19.3m.

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