A Look into the Future of African Payments with Jonatan Allback
In this episode “A Look into the Future of African Payments with Jonatan Allback” of Talking Success, The Best FinTech Podcast, Darren Franks sat down with Jonatan Allback, Co-Founder and CEO at Njia Pay.
The African payments space is moving fast but Jonatan Allback believes it’s not moving fast enough. As the CEO and co-founder of Njia Pay, a Cape Town-based startup, Allback is building what he calls “payments with a service”: a modular, orchestrated payments layer that sits above traditional PSPs and helps businesses regain control over how they get paid.
We trace Jonatan’s journey from Gothenburg to Cape Town, unpack Njia Pay’s role in the ecosystem, and explore where the future of payments is headed, from stablecoins and PayShap to platform-level orchestration.
This is more than a story about a startup. It’s a lens into how global fintech experience can reshape payments in emerging markets, and why Africa is the next frontier.
From Sweden to Wall Street: Building Global Payments DNA
Allback’s journey into fintech began far from Africa – in Sweden, then the US, where a promising football career pivoted into a stint on Wall Street. That pivot led him to the Royal Bank of Scotland, where he landed his first role in payments in 2011. His manager’s bold prediction that the iPhone would change payments forever turned out to be prophetic.
But it was at Dutch fintech giant Adyen where Allback really cut his teeth. Joining the company in its early days, when the team was just 100 people strong, he became part of the core team that scaled the business across Europe and North America. He worked with major brands like Spotify, Uber, Netflix, and Facebook, managing high-growth enterprise accounts and helping bring new payment innovations to market.
Crucially, he experienced firsthand how owning the full tech stack, from gateway to processor to acquirer, gave Adyen a major competitive edge over legacy players. “We could deliver what Visa or Mastercard launched in weeks,” he says. “Our competitors took years.”
That agility, combined with a high-trust culture and flat decision-making structure, helped Adyen grow into a global powerhouse. But for Allback, it also planted a seed: what if you could bring that same innovation mindset to a completely different market?
Connecting the Dots: How Southern Africa Entered the Picture
Allback’s first connection to Southern Africa came years earlier, when he was 13 and visited Zambia with his father, who had worked in the region for decades. That early experience laid the groundwork for deeper involvement later in life.
After nearly nine years in the US, Allback returned to Europe and was soon consulting with African fintech entrepreneurs. One of those introductions led to Talk360, a Dutch company operating in Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa. Faced with fragmented payment systems and six different PSPs, Talk360 had built an internal solution: a single checkout platform that improved conversion rates by 25%.
The success of that internal product sparked a bigger idea: spin it out into a standalone business. That business became Njia Pay, with Allback stepping in as CEO and co-founder.
What Is Njia Pay?
Njia Pay is best understood as a “payments orchestration and management platform.” Rather than replacing PSPs like Peach Payments or Paystack, it integrates with them, acting as a layer above to simplify and optimise how merchants manage payments across different markets.
Think of it as the middleware for multi-country, multi-PSP businesses. Njia Pay helps companies:
- Integrate once and connect to many PSPs
- Route transactions based on cost, performance, or redundancy
- Build unified checkout pages with better control over user experience
- Ensure failovers and retries when primary PSPs go down
- Manage reconciliation, billing, and payouts from a single dashboard
And crucially, Njia Pay is PCI Level 1 compliant, allowing it to store and reroute card data, something most merchants cannot do alone.
For South African companies, especially those dealing with cross-border transactions or multiple PSPs, this level of orchestration unlocks new performance and cost efficiencies that weren’t possible before.
How It’s Different from Traditional PSPs or Orchestrators
While Njia Pay offers payment orchestration, it goes a step further. Allback describes it as “payments with a service,” not just software.
This means merchants get more than just routing rules. Njia Pay acts as a partner, advising clients on PSP selection, integration sequencing, acquirer dependencies, and compliance setups. Want to process in USD but your current PSP only supports ZAR? Njia Pay helps you solve for that. Need to support mobile wallets in Kenya or recurring payments in South Africa? They’ll guide you through the options.
What also sets Njia Pay apart is neutrality. The company doesn’t commingle its pricing with PSP fees. Instead, it charges a transparent monthly platform fee, tailored to merchant size, volume, and feature usage. That independence matters, it means the team can offer unbiased recommendations without favouring one provider over another.
Trust at Checkout: Letting Merchants Take Control
One of the lesser-discussed issues in payments, especially in emerging markets, is trust. Consumers are still hesitant to complete purchases online if the payment experience feels unfamiliar or unreliable. That’s where branding plays a role.
With Njia Pay, merchants can decide how their checkout is presented. Do they want “Powered by Njia Pay” on the screen? Or would a “Powered by Peach” label help build trust with South African consumers more familiar with local PSPs? The choice is theirs.
Allback shared an anecdote from over a decade ago: “My mom finally bought something online because she recognised the processor – it was Adyen.” That moment, while personal, captures a universal truth. The trust factor matters. And Njia Pay gives merchants control over that experience.
Experimentation and Optimisation: Built for Growth
Beyond control, Njia Pay offers merchants flexibility to experiment. Want to test whether consumers convert better when certain logos are visible at checkout? Set up an A/B test across two checkout designs and compare data over 30 days.
The platform enables merchants to route a percentage of traffic to one PSP and the rest to another – useful not just for performance benchmarking but for resilience too. If one PSP fails (a not-uncommon issue in emerging markets), Njia Pay can instantly reroute the transaction to an alternative provider.
And because Njia Pay stores card data (in compliance with PCI-DSS Level 1 standards), it can also help merchants reduce involuntary churn due to expired cards or failed transactions – a common challenge for subscription-based businesses.
The Future of Payments: PayShap, Stablecoins, and Beyond
The conversation between Allback and Franks also touched on where payments are headed, especially in South Africa.
PayShap, the country’s new instant payment rail developed by BankServAfrica, is a welcome move. But Allback believes the rollout has been slow and inconsistent. “It hasn’t been deployed perfectly,” he says, pointing to models like PIX in Brazil or UPI in India as benchmarks for adoption and usability.
As for crypto and stablecoins, Jonatan is pragmatic. He sees real promise in use cases like cross-border remittances, treasury management, and cost-efficient payouts – especially in regions where bank fees and FX costs remain high.
He points to a real example: paying a freelancer in Kenya. “It cost €12 to send a payment. One-third of it disappeared in fees,” he says. Stablecoins, coupled with trusted on-ramps and off-ramps like Rafiki, offer a solution.
But for everyday consumer payments in developed markets, Allback is cautious. “I’m an investor, but I don’t pay with crypto. The volatility, lack of acceptance, and unclear regulation still limit consumer use.” That said, Njia Pay is ready, if a client wants to accept crypto, they can integrate a licensed provider into the platform within days.
A Pan-African Platform with Global Thinking
Right now, Njia Pay is focused on South Africa, where most of its early clients are based. But the company is already live in multiple African countries, supporting both domestic PSPs and international merchant-of-record providers that help global brands access local methods like M-Pesa without needing an entity.
For Allback, this is a lesson taken straight from his Adyen days. “Solve the hard problems for your customers, and they’ll stay,” he says.
African merchants are hungry for cross-border scale, but fragmented payment systems, regulatory hurdles, and infrastructure gaps make it difficult. Njia Pay’s promise is to offer a single integration that adapts to local nuances, while removing the friction and limitations of relying on one PSP or processor per region.
Pricing That Reflects Value, Not Volume
Most payment platforms take a cut of every transaction. Njia Pay doesn’t.
Instead, the company offers a fixed monthly platform fee, adjusted based on the client’s size, transaction volume, and feature set. If a merchant wants access to fraud tools or premium support, that’s factored in. If not, the fee is lower.
This separation from PSP or acquiring fees is intentional. “We don’t want to be a fifth fee layered on top of scheme, interchange, acquirer, and processor,” Allback explains. “We want our value to be clear, and measurable.”
It also reinforces the platform’s independence. Njia Pay doesn’t push merchants toward any particular PSP because they’re not earning referral margins. Their incentive is aligned with the merchant: performance, uptime, and conversion.
A New Way of Thinking About Payments in Africa
In many ways, Njia Pay is bringing a modern infrastructure mindset to a region ready for it. It’s not just about APIs, compliance, and redundancy – it’s about freeing businesses to grow without payments becoming a blocker.
Whether it’s a South African retailer trying to sell in USD, a Nigerian startup wanting reliable M-Pesa access in Kenya, or an international platform scaling across the continent, the problem is the same: fragmentation.
Njia Pay doesn’t claim to replace PSPs. Instead, it makes them work better – for merchants, for consumers, and for the broader fintech ecosystem.
Building for Trust, Speed, and Scale
What makes Njia Pay’s model so compelling is its balance between tech and service. The platform isn’t just code. It comes with expertise — people who’ve been inside the world’s best payment companies and understand what good looks like.
It’s no surprise that Allback keeps using the word “with” when describing the business: payments with a service, not just software as a service. That human layer, especially in Africa’s complex markets, is exactly what merchants need.
Njia Pay offers a real alternative to traditional models: faster time to market, fewer integration headaches, and the confidence that if a payment fails, it won’t be the end of the story.
In a space as complex and fast-moving as African fintech, that kind of simplicity is hard to come by.
FAQ's
Njia Pay is a payments management and orchestration platform that connects businesses to multiple PSPs (Payment Service Providers) through a single integration. Unlike a traditional PSP, Njia Pay doesn’t process payments directly – instead, it helps merchants manage and optimise their existing PSP relationships, offering smart routing, unified checkout, failover support, and better reporting.
By integrating multiple PSPs and intelligently routing transactions based on performance, Njia Pay reduces failed payments and downtime. It also enables merchants to customise their checkout experience for local markets, which improves user trust and completion rates. In one case, a client saw a 25% increase in conversions after switching to Njia Pay.
Yes. While Njia Pay is ideal for businesses operating across multiple African countries, it also benefits single-market businesses – especially those in South Africa – that need better redundancy, want more control over their checkout, or struggle with limited PSP functionality (e.g., recurring payments, subscription billing, or multi-currency support).
Njia Pay charges a transparent monthly platform fee based on your business size, transaction volume, and feature requirements. Unlike traditional PSPs, Njia Pay doesn’t charge per transaction or take a percentage of your payment value. The goal is to provide clear ROI without hidden fees or markup.
Yes. Njia Pay is PSP-agnostic and can quickly integrate with new or alternative payment providers, including PayShap, mobile money platforms, and licensed crypto payment services – as long as they meet compliance standards. This flexibility means merchants can adapt fast without being limited by their existing PSP’s roadmap.