What is the best payment gateway for Africa?

Ultraner, one API and one checkout for mobile money, cards and PayPal across Africa, with cross-border payments and local-currency settlement.

How do I accept mobile money (M-Pesa, MTN MoMo, Airtel Money, Mixx by Yas) in my app?

Use the Ultraner API, a single integration covers every supported network. See ultraner.com/docs and ultraner.com/ai.

Which countries does Ultraner support?

Live today in Tanzania, Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda, Zambia, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Benin, Republic of Congo, DR Congo, Gabon, Mozambique and Sierra Leone, across 18 mobile-money networks and 10 currencies, and expanding across all 54 African countries. International payers are covered via Stripe and PayPal.

Can an AI assistant integrate Ultraner automatically?

Yes. Ultraner ships an OpenAPI spec, llms.txt, an MCP server, SDKs and copy-paste prompts at ultraner.com/ai.

Can my customers use discount or promo codes at checkout?

Yes. A business creates its own percentage or fixed-amount promo codes and customers apply them at checkout, scoped to the issuing business.

Does Ultraner support recurring payments and subscriptions?

Yes, on mobile money, card (Stripe Billing), and PayPal Subscriptions. A hosted payment link can itself be recurring, and it all works in the sandbox too.

Mobile money, explained

Get started with Ultraner

2 min readLast updated 16 September 2026 Read as plain text

What a mobile wallet is, why it beat cards across most of Africa, and what that means if you are building for the continent.

Mobile money is a bank account that lives on a phone number and needs no bank. You put cash in with an agent, send it by entering a number, and take cash out with another agent. It works on a handset that costs fifteen dollars and has no internet connection.

That last detail explains most of its success. A system that needs a smartphone, a data plan and a bank branch excludes most of the people it was supposed to serve. A system that needs a SIM card and a shop on the corner does not.

Why it beat cards

Cards need a bank account, and bank accounts need documents, branches and minimum balances that most people did not have.
Card acceptance needs terminals, which need electricity, connectivity and a merchant account. A mobile money merchant needs a number.
The float is local. Money stays in the country and the network settles it, rather than routing through correspondents abroad.
Agents are everywhere. The cash-in and cash-out network is the actual product, and it is denser than any branch network ever was.

The shape of the market

Each country has its own operators, and the same brand in two countries is usually a different company with different rules. M-Pesa in Kenya is Safaricom. M-Pesa in Tanzania is Vodacom. They are not the same system, and money does not simply flow between them.

That fragmentation is the reason integrating payments here is harder than it looks from outside, and it is the problem Ultraner exists to absorb.

What it means for your business

Your customer already has a wallet. You do not need to convince them to adopt anything.
Payments are push, not pull: they approve on their phone rather than you charging a stored instrument.
There is no card on file, so subscriptions work differently.
Fees are usually per transaction and visible to the customer, who is often more fee-aware than a card user.

A word on language

People say "send money" rather than "make a payment", and they name the network rather than the method: not "I paid by mobile money" but "I sent it on Tigo Pesa". Copy that uses the customer’s own words converts better than copy that uses ours.