Tecno PalmPay
The parent company behind Tecno wants to go the Apple Pay model - integrate payment in your hardware. Transsion Holdings which controls Tecno, Infinix, and ITel is launching PalmPay. It is expected that it would bundle this payment system in its devices. As the largest OEM in Africa, this could be significant. This could be a huge competition from the flanks to some fintech firms. If you have Tecno with a native (good) payment system, you may not bother to install a new payment app. The fintech sector is very dynamic in Africa.
We have evidence in our possession that Transsion, through a joint venture with NetEase – a Chinese Internet technology company is prepping to launch a service by the name PalmPay, under a newly registered company, Transsnet Payment Limited. According to Transsnet’s documentation, they describe themselves as a company that develops financial services for the mobile generation in Africa and aim to reach 100 million users within the next 3 years.
What we know so far is that PalmPay will offer mobile loans as well as a payments platform that will allow users to send money to each other, pay for bills and buy airtime. Additionally, there’s a mention of PalmPoints, which is some form of loyalty program to keep the customers engaged with the product.
We can predict that Transsion will use its smartphone market share to push PalmPay to its consumers. This is to say that PalmPay will come pre-installed on all Transsion-owned smartphone brands and with human curiosity, user conversion rate might be off the roof.