South African fintech, Peach Payments, has entered a partnership with Sukhiba, a Kenya-based customer relationship management (CRM) platform, enabling it to provide WhatsApp-based sales to its South African merchants.
Peach, which in April 2024 raised $31 million in Series A funding, will leverage Sukhiba’s technology enabling its merchants to integrate their catalogues into WhatsApp. This makes it possible for the merchants to manage sales, accept payments, and arrange deliveries.
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Payments will be processed via Peach Payments offering customers various payment methods such as:
- Card payments
- EFT, and
- Buy-Now-Pay-Later options
“It provides a single way of dealing with all customer-related activities – sales, marketing, payments, deliveries, customer service, loyalty program and re-marketing – on a platform consumers are already familiar with,” said Peach Payments CEO and co-founder, Rahul Jain.
“For many companies, this is key as their sales channels may currently be geared towards their websites, but their customers want to interact via WhatsApp; the most popular social media platform in South Africa, with a 94% penetration among the country’s internet users.”
Merchants using Peach Payments will incur a monthly subscription fee instead of Sukhiba’s additional per-transaction charges.
Sukhiba, the Kenyan firm, operates through WhatsApp and is accessible in six African nations:
- South Africa
- Kenya
- Tanzania
- Rwanda
- Uganda, and
- Nigeria.
The service is also active in Oman and India, catering to over 35,000 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
According to Sukhiba, the new relationship will enhance chat or conversational commerce and payment processes in South Africa. The company further emphasized that for merchants who already utilize WhatsApp for customer interactions, this partnership will offer a valuable tool for seamless engagement and transactions.
Kenyans have emerged as heavy users of Whatsapp, a situation that has seen the emergence of several financial and e-commerce solutions built on top of the messaging service.
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In 2019, The Kenya Housing Finance Bank launched the first WhatsApp Banking service in Kenya in partnership with Waya Waya Ltd.
The service enables customers to access the entire banking portfolio right within Whatsapp chatting service.
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More recently the Kenyan ‘social commerce’ startup, Chpter, raised $1.2 million in a pre-seed funding round which would see it expand to more markets including South Africa.
According to Chpter, ‘social commerce,’ a kind of e-commerce taking place over social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and soon TikTok, has grown over the years in emerging markets and accounts for the majority of e-commerce activity on the continent.
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