NaijaTalkTalk: Why Paga’s Goal of Reaching 15 Million Active Users By 2015 May Be Far-Fetched

Paga agent

It was just about a year ago that local payment startup, Paga reached 2 million registered users with over 11 million transactions processed amounting to over 120 billion Naira (US$ 750 million) as at June 2014.
Today, the service has crossed the 3 million registered user mark, with over 8,000 agents and 3,000 merchants, almost doubling its figures as of last June. It reached the 1 million mark in November 2013.

Paga, which commercially launched back in September 2011, says over a million new people used Paga to carry out transactions in the year 2014 and further processed 6.6 million transactions worth N69 billion during the past year.

However, the payment startup may still be seeing low figures in terms of monthly active users (MAUs) with the last official figure we reported was less than 350,000 MAUs, according to CEO, Tayo Oviosu, which as at November 2013 was 33% of its over 1 million users.

Paga_webpage_3million_users

Fast forward to June 2015, about 18 months later, assuming that, say 35% of its current total registered users (3,000,000) are actively using the service monthly to pay bills, transfer funds and buy phone credits, it means that Paga would have crossed over 1 million monthly active users.

Although these are mere conjecture, there are indications that given the growth of the platform in the past year, one can argue that reaching 1 million active users is a milestone long overdue. Yet, the startup still has a long way to go to reach its goals.

Paga has since set a target to reach 15 million active users and 30,000 agents by 2015, but it does appear that it would take a very long while (perhaps in a decade) before reaching this target, even as it may likely not reach our prediction of 2 million active users by 2015 year-end.

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