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Pesapal gives African shops and businesses the tools to accept payments online and in person, and to run their operations.
Pesapal is a payments company built for African businesses. It gives a shop or small business the tools to take money from customers — online through a website or app, and in person through a card reader at the counter. Around those payment pipes, it also sells the software a business needs to run day to day: things like invoicing, keeping track of sales, and managing a till.
The way it makes money is straightforward. Every time a business accepts a payment through Pesapal, Pesapal takes a small cut of the transaction. So its fortunes rise and fall with how much its merchants sell. That is why the company pushes beyond payments into business software: a shop that runs its whole operation on Pesapal's tools is a shop that is less likely to switch to a rival, and more likely to route more of its sales through Pesapal's rails. Pesapal operates across several African markets from its base in Kenya, where mobile money is king and many businesses still handle cash. Its pitch to those businesses is convenience and reach: accept the payment methods customers actually use, and get a dashboard that shows what is selling. It competes with banks, telecom-linked mobile money services, and other payment processors chasing the same merchants.
The bigger picture is that payments are the front door to a much larger business. Once Pesapal is processing a merchant's money, it can layer on lending, software, and other services — the same playbook payment companies around the world have used to grow from a toll booth into a platform.
Saved answer · last researched 15 Nov 2026