SA Fintech Peach Payments Secures New Investment for Expansion

• SA fintech Peach Payments has secured new investment to drive its expansion into Africa. In a round led by Umkhathi Wethu Ventures (UW Ventures), in partnership with Allan Gray.
• The firm hasn’t revealed the investment size. However, when pressed as to whether the round was higher than R10-million, admitted that it was.
• Peach Payments operates an online payment platform in SA for entrepreneurs, SMEs and large businesses. the fintech startup previously raised a seed round of €50 000 in 2013.

SA fintech Peach Payments has secured new investment to drive its expansion into Africa. In a round led by Umkhathi Wethu Ventures (UW Ventures), in partnership with Allan Gray.

A number of business executives from Europe and South Africa as well as established investors have participated in the round.

This comes after a disclosure earlier this week that the two investors had invested in another SA fintech, CompariSure, along with SA venture capital (VC) firm 4Di Capital.

Peach Payments runs an online B2B payment platform for South African businesses and was founded in 2012 by German Andreas Demleitner and Indian born Rahul Jain. Jain, originally from Delhi, lives in Cape Town while Demleitner lives in Berlin.

The firm hasn’t revealed the investment size. However, when pressed as to whether the round was higher than R10-million, Jain admitted that it was.

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Peach Payments operates an online payment platform in SA for entrepreneurs, SMEs and large businesses. the fintech startup previously raised a seed round of €50 000 in 2013, following participation in the 2012 Google Umbono/88 mph accelerator. A few years later the fintech received a second, undisclosed investment from an Austrian angel investor.

Jain says there is increasing demand for Peach Payments services. He says the company currently serves between 1,500 and 2,000 merchants — including three of the four large supermarket groups in South Africa — and signs up between 200 and 300 new merchants each week.

The Covid-19 pandemic has enabled the fintech close sales from merchants who have been mulling for a long time whether to go with Peach Payments or not..

The organization made two hires each in March and April to keep up with demand, and now has 40 employees.

This, while employees are working on weekends and evenings to meet demand, he says. It was like this that the company was able to conclude an agreement in March with the popular website building platform Wix.

The agreement now allows the company to offer support for platforms like Xero and Wix – making it easier for African startups and SMEs to take their business online.

As such, Peach Payments now provides access to market-leading card processing and EFT solutions for those who use the Wix platform to build online businesses. The fintech is also a payment partner with Shopify, WooCommerce and Magento, among others.

Jain pointed out that it took the company two years to land the contract with Wix but that the agreement had eventually passed two weeks before the lockout by South Africa.

Turning to the African expansion plans of the company, Jain said while Peach Payments launched a bid to expand to Kenya in 2016 , the company only started to sign up merchants there at the end of last year, after facing regulatory challenges there. Things were made simpler when a number of payment regulations were later modified by the Kenyan Government.

And while the Covid-19 pandemic may have restricted travel between African states, Jain said the company will take advantage of the credibility it has built up over eight years and the numerous meetings already held before the pandemic to broker sales deals across the continent. For example , the company has already visited Nigeria for more than three years.

“We’ve been pushed,” points out Jain when referring to how the company is having to service the increased demand. But he is certain that the pandemic has ushered in a totally new order of things, where online payments have become the norm.

“The acceleration of the adoption of ecommerce won’t go back after lockdown”. Jain said