Every time a customer in Lagos or Nairobi or Cape Town taps “pay now” and nothing happens, a merchant loses money. This is usually not in a dramatic, headline-grabbing way; however, it happens just quietly, in the background. When you multiply that across thousands of daily checkouts, you will begin to understand why Jonatan Allback left behind a senior career at one of the world’s most sophisticated payment companies to come and solve something that most of the industry has simply looked past.
Allback is the CEO and co-founder of NjiaPay, a payment orchestration and aggregation platform built specifically for African merchants. The company is barely a year old as a standalone business, but it carries the fingerprints of someone who has spent the better part of 15 years inside the plumbing of global payments, first at Adyen, where he spent over eight years working with global names like Amazon, Netflix, and Uber, and later at Skipify. NjiaPay is his attempt to apply that institutional knowledge to a market that global players have historically served poorly, if at all.
TechPolyp virtually sat down with Allback recently for a wide-ranging conversation about what NjiaPay does, why Africa needs it, and where the company is headed after closing a $2.1 million seed round.
From Talk360’s Problem to Africa’s Infrastructure
NjiaPay did not begin as a startup idea; rather, it began as a survival mechanism.
Talk360, the South African international calling app that connects migrant communities across more than 100 countries, was running six separate payment service provider integrations simultaneously. The operational overhead was crushing. Different APIs, different documentation standards, and different webhook formats, each new provider added its own layer of complexity, hence consuming engineering time and suppressing conversion rates.
Talk360’s payment authorization rates in South Africa were sitting at 65%, significantly lower than the global standard. When existing providers couldn’t supply the data needed to diagnose and fix the problem, Talk360’s team built an internal orchestration system to take control of the checkout experience themselves.
Subsequent upon implementing the platform, Talk360 reduced six PSP integrations to one and achieved a 25% increase in checkout conversion in key markets. That kind of outcome is hard to ignore. When the founding team saw what the internal tool had produced, the question shifted from “how do we fix our own payments?” to “how many other African merchants are dealing with the exact same thing?”
The answer, it turned out, was a lot of them. NjiaPay was spun out as its own entity in December 2024, with Allback, who had been brought in to advise, joining as CEO and co-founder alongside Roderick Simons, formerly CTO of European Open Banking platform Yolt.
What NjiaPay actually does
Allback is precise about what NjiaPay is and, just as importantly, what it is not. “The main reason is that most of the payment companies in South Africa, which is our core market, tend to focus on being in the money flow and becoming a PSP, which we are not. We sit above the PSPs. We aggregate the PSPs, and we can help orchestrate between the PSPs to help improve conversion and success rate for our clients,” he said.
That distinction matters commercially and technically, as NjiaPay does not hold merchant funds or act as an acquirer. It does not replace a merchant’s existing relationships with providers like Flutterwave or Paystack. What it does is sit above all of them as a neutral orchestration layer connected to a merchant’s full stack of payment service providers through a single API and route each transaction in real time to whichever provider is most likely to produce a successful outcome, factoring in card type, issuing bank, payment method, and geography.
The Baymard Institute puts the average cart abandonment rate at 70.19%. Across NjiaPay’s merchant base, businesses using a single provider see between 20% and 30% of transactions fail, well behind the global card-not-present benchmark of around 85% success. South Africa, Allback explained in the interview, currently sits at 70 to 75% payment success rates compared to 85 to 90% in more developed markets. That gap is the commercial opportunity NjiaPay is targeting.
Beyond routing, the platform consolidates everything into a unified portal. In essence, it has one reconciliation file, one performance dashboard, and one place for customer support teams to investigate failed transactions, instead of logging into five different provider backends to piece together what happened. For subscription businesses managing recurring revenue across multiple African markets, that shift from manual aggregation to automated reporting is not a minor quality-of-life improvement, but it directly affects financial forecasting and churn management.
The Card Account Updater — a tool Africa hasn’t had
One feature Allback discussed in detail is the Card Account Updater service, something he described as widely established in the United States and parts of Europe but largely absent from African markets until now.
The concept is that when a customer’s card expires, gets lost, or is replaced following fraud, the saved card details on file with a merchant become stale. The next charge fails. In subscription businesses, streaming, SaaS, gyms, and telecoms, this creates what the industry calls involuntary churn. This shows customers who did not choose to cancel but whose payments quietly stopped working. NjiaPay is introducing Card Account Updater to South Africa, a tool that automatically synchronizes saved card details to reduce avoidable payment failures.
The mechanism works directly with card networks, Visa and Mastercard, to detect when a card in a merchant’s vault has changed and update the stored details proactively, before the next charge attempt. Companies like Netflix and Spotify have used versions of this tool for years to protect subscription revenue. In Africa, where the infrastructure to support it at scale is only now maturing, it represents a meaningful new capability for merchants running recurring billing.
Allback acknowledged that uptake by issuing banks remains a challenge; the tool only works when banks participate in the update protocol, but described it as an area of active development and a key differentiator for the platform.
Security, PCI certification, and the enterprise conversation
When the conversation turned to security, Allback was direct about why this matters, particularly for the merchant segment NjiaPay is targeting. PCI DSS Level 1, the highest level of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, requires quarterly network scanning, regular penetration testing, and strict controls over how cardholder data is stored and transmitted. NjiaPay stores card data in compliance with PCI-DSS Level 1 standards, which allows the platform to offer card vaulting services that many smaller or mid-market merchants could not achieve independently.
“It has gotten interest from startups that need multiple PSPs to enterprise clients that are looking to improve their payment offering, but don’t have the capabilities or capacity to become PCI-compliant,” Allback said. That dynamic is particularly relevant in Africa, where the compliance overhead of maintaining PCI Level 1 certification is prohibitive for all but the largest organisations. The act of offering compliant card storage as a platform service confers on NjiaPay the privilege to remove a meaningful barrier to entry for merchants who want to run stored-card transactions or subscription billing without building the compliance infrastructure themselves.
The Funding, The Team, and What Comes Next
NjiaPay recently closed a seed funding round led by Newion, one of Europe’s leading B2B SaaS investors. The $2.1 million raise, equivalent to approximately R35 million, came just twelve months after the company closed an oversubscribed $1.3 million pre-seed round led by HAVAÍC, with participation from Renew Capital and a range of angels across Africa and Europe. The speed of the follow-on is notable for a company that only began operating externally in early 2025.
“In just one year, we have demonstrated that payment orchestration is not optional in Africa; it is mission-critical,” Allback said of the milestone.
The company currently employs approximately 12 people, split between its Amsterdam headquarters and offices in Cape Town. The seed capital will go toward expanding the engineering and commercial teams, deepening integrations with additional PSPs, and accelerating NjiaPay’s geographical footprint across the continent.
Current clients include Talk360, Anytime Fitness South Africa, and Melon Mobile, a mix of high-growth digital businesses and global franchise operators that each represent a different version of the same underlying problem: too many payment providers, too little visibility, too much revenue leakage.
On geographic expansion, Allback confirmed that Nigeria is firmly on the roadmap. The company is already technically live in Nigeria and Kenya alongside its core South African market, and the seed capital will support deepening those presences rather than spreading thinly into new markets before the foundation is solid.
The gap that built a company
Africa hosts more than 276 mobile wallets, over 500 banks, and 12 distinct card networks spread across 54 countries, and less than 1% of the continent’s $380 billion in non-cash payments flow through cards. That is not a payments market with one problem, but rather, a payments market with dozens of overlapping, interacting problems that vary by country, by payment method, by issuing bank, and by consumer behaviour. This, indeed, is a solution built for Europe, or the United States does not port cleanly into this environment.
What NjiaPay is building is less a product than an operating philosophy. It is to the effect that the complexity of African payments should be owned by a specialist layer that sits between merchants and their providers, absorbing that complexity so that merchants do not have to. “We don’t want to be a fifth fee layered on top of scheme, interchange, acquirer, and processor,” Allback said. The company charges a fixed monthly platform fee based on transaction volume and feature set, explicitly separating its revenue model from the per-transaction economics that have made African payment fees punishing for merchants operating at scale.
For a continent where a significant share of digital commerce still fails silently at checkout, that might be exactly the kind of boring, infrastructure-grade fix that ends up mattering more than the flashier fintech innovations that tend to capture attention. Allback has seen enough of both worlds, the polished checkout flows of Netflix and Uber, and the 65% authorization rates of an African calling app in the middle of trying to scale, to know which problem is more urgent.
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