AI-native payment infrastructure

Africa's payments,
routed by intelligence.

PAX consolidates banks, mobile operators, fintechs and billers into a single API — routing every transaction down its highest-success path, scoring fraud and credit in real time, and settling at a scale legacy switches were never built for.

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Executive summary

Why Prime Airtime, why now

Six reasons PAX is positioned to lead Africa's next wave of intelligent payments.

01

Massive, accelerating market

Africa's digital payments are projected to exceed $40B by 2026, with mobile money accounting for roughly 74% of global mobile-money volume.

02

AI-native infrastructure

Machine learning powers routing, fraud detection, credit scoring and customer experience — not bolted on afterward, built into the core.

03

Unmatched processing capacity

100,000 TPS — roughly 4× Visa, 5× Mastercard, 20× PayPal — on virtualised data centres engineered specifically for African load patterns.

04

Trusted partner network

Integrated with NIBSS, the Central Bank of Nigeria, the NCC, ProvidusBank and tier-1 fintechs across Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya.

05

Proven unit economics

66% net income margin, $0.54 gross income per transaction, $0.21 blended CAC — capital-efficient and built to scale without heavy burn.

06

Clear path to 50× growth

From $198M to a targeted $3.7B+ in gross trading value, driven by AI products, agency-bank distribution and pan-African expansion.

The problem

Africa's payment rails are leaking trust — and revenue

Failed transactions, fraud and integration sprawl cost banks and fintechs billions every year.

$118.5B Lost globally to failed payments each year
1 of 3 Consumers who leave after a single false decline
$500M+ Lost annually to cybercrime in Nigeria alone
8.7–12.6% Average cross-border payment cost in Sub-Saharan Africa

Average transaction failure rate by segment (Africa)

Sources: LexisNexis Risk Solutions · EFCC Annual Cybercrime Report · GSMA State of the Industry 2024 · PAX internal benchmarks across 22 partners.

The PAX solution

One AI-powered platform.
Every payment use case.

PAX consolidates Africa's fragmented payment stack into a single API — engineered for intelligence, scale and trust.

AI Decisioning Engine

Reinforcement-learning models route every transaction to its highest-success channel in real time, learning continuously from 200M+ historical events.

Adaptive Fraud Defence

Behavioural biometrics and graph neural networks identify fraud rings and mule networks before settlement — not after the money has moved.

Unified Aggregation

One integration covers every operator, every biller, every wallet — across Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya and beyond.

Data-as-a-Service

Real-time spending intelligence and credit signals delivered to partner banks via streaming APIs, unlocking new lending products.

One-stop-shop payment infrastructure  ·  Aggregating every transaction group  ·  99.99% uptime

Value proposition

What PAX delivers, by stakeholder

A single platform creating measurable value for every actor in the African payment stack.

Banks

Higher transaction success, lower fraud losses, faster product launches.

+18%success uplift
97%fraud true-positive rate

Live with Wema, Providus, FCMB

Mobile operators

Maximised airtime and data ARPU with real-time bundle personalisation.

+22%ARPU lift
31%churn reduction

Live with MTN, Airtel, Glo, 9mobile

Fintechs

One API for every rail, with fraud and credit scoring plugged straight in.

1 APIfor 22+ rails
<24hwhite-label deploy

Live with Recharge4, Flutterwave

Consumers

Reliable top-ups, fair pricing, and financial services that simply work.

<50msrouting decisions
850Kdirect users by 2026

Live via the Recharge4 brand

AI innovations

Six AI products powering our partners

Each model is trained on 200M+ proprietary transactions across African payment rails.

Adaptive Smart Routing

A reinforcement-learning router selects the highest-success processing path per transaction in under 50ms.

+18% success rate uplift

Graph-Based Fraud Defence

Graph neural networks identify fraud rings, mule networks and BIN attacks before settlement.

97% true-positive rate

Real-Time Credit Engine

Alternative credit scoring built from airtime, bill and remittance behaviour — for thin-file populations banks can't otherwise reach.

12 sec decision time

Conversational Payment AI

An LLM-powered agent handles transfers, top-ups and bill pay through WhatsApp, SMS and USSD.

60% deflection from human support

Churn & Retention Models

Predicts customer abandonment up to 14 days ahead and automatically triggers retention offers via partner APIs.

31% reduction in monthly churn

Dynamic Pricing & Offers

Personalised data-bundle, airtime and bill-payment offers calibrated to each customer's price elasticity.

+22% average revenue per user

Competitive edge

Engineered to outpace the global incumbents

Transaction processing capacity, measured in transactions per second (TPS).

PAX (Prime Airtime)100,000
Visa25,000
Mastercard20,000
SWIFT Network6,000
PayPal5,000
Typical African aggregator1,000

Source: PAX internal benchmarks; Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, SWIFT published capacity figures.

4×Faster than Visa at peak load
5×Faster than Mastercard
20×PayPal's processing throughput
100×Faster than typical African aggregators

Market opportunity

A $456B ecosystem at an inflection point

Africa leads the world in mobile money — and the next wave belongs to intelligent infrastructure.

$456BAfrica digital payments market size, 2026
500M+Active mobile money accounts on the continent
$830BMobile money transactions processed annually
490MMobile phone subscribers across Africa
74%Of global mobile money volume runs through Africa
$40BDigital payments revenue by 2026

Nigeria — our home market and beachhead

200M+ population, $200B+ in annual digital payments, and an unstoppable mobile-first economy.

  • Licensed PSSP under the Central Bank of Nigeria
  • Direct settlement participant in NIBSS Instant Payments
  • VAS licence holder with the NCC for telco aggregation
  • Tier-1 banking integrations: Wema, Providus, FCMB, GTBank, Access
  • Live with all four MNOs: MTN, Airtel, Glo, 9mobile
  • NDPR-certified data handling; ISO 27001 in progress
$200B+Annual digital payment value (NIBSS)
47.4MPOS terminals deployed nationwide
$28BAnnual mobile money transaction value
85%Of adults now have a financial account

Ecosystem

Where PAX sits in Africa's payment stack

A single API layer connecting consumers, businesses, banks and infrastructure providers.

Banks

Wema · FCMB · Providus · Titan Trust · Carbon · GTBank

Mobile operators

MTN · Airtel · Glo · 9mobile · Digicel · Verizon

Fintechs

Flutterwave · Aella · Cellulant · Thrive · iRecharge

Billers

DSTV · IBEDC · EKEDC · FIRS · Lagos State · Ringo

Traction

Compounding volume on minimal capital

Cumulative transactions processed — nine-times growth on a lean cost base.

$198M+Cumulative transaction value
206M+Transactions processed
22+B2B partners integrated
3.2%Contribution margin per transaction
Banking

Tier-1 Nigerian bank

Challenge

39% airtime VTU failure rate; ₦2.4B annual reconciliation overhead.

Result

+24%txn success
67%reconciliation cut
8 wksto deployment
Mobile operator

Multi-country MNO

Challenge

Static airtime bundle pricing left 18%+ ARPU on the table.

Result

+22%ARPU lift
31%churn reduction
4 wkspilot to live
Fintech

Pan-African fintech

Challenge

10+ bilateral integrations were required just to launch a basic neobank product.

Result

24hto live
1 API22+ rails
850Kusers, year 1

Roadmap

Three horizons to category leadership

From foundation to pan-African category leader in AI-powered payment infrastructure.

Now → 12 months

Scale the core

  • Expand into Ghana & Kenya with banking and telco partners
  • Launch AI fraud and credit APIs across all B2B clients
  • Onboard 15 additional tier-1 banks and large fintechs
  • Deploy a 24×7 multilingual contact centre
12 → 24 months

Productise AI

  • Launch Recharge4 internationally (UK/EU diaspora corridor)
  • Roll out PAX Crypto on Solana under regulated rails
  • Release an LLM-powered conversational payment agent
  • Onboard the agency-bank channel: target 100K agents
24 → 48 months

Category leader

  • Expand to North Africa and Francophone West Africa
  • Launch an embedded finance toolkit for non-financial brands
  • Open APIs to global remittance corridors (Asia, US, EU)
  • Position for strategic exit or pan-African public listing

Leadership

Operators who have built and shipped at scale

A cross-border team combining African market depth with global engineering rigour.

KE

Kemal Ercelik

Founder & CEO

20+ years in telecom and payments. Built and scaled VTU platforms across three continents.

KK

Kolstantin Kolstov

Chief Technology Officer

Architect of PAX's AI infrastructure, with a deep machine-learning engineering background.

SP

Silviya Petrova

VP Marketing

Brand and growth across consumer fintech. Led Recharge4 to a multi-million-user launch.

SM

Stephen Aduroja

VP Product, B2C

Owns the Recharge4 consumer experience and its AI-driven personalisation roadmap.

OA

Oluwaseun Adewale

Head of Legal & Compliance

Regulatory liaison with the CBN, NIBSS and pan-African regulators. NDPR-certified.

AA

Adekunle Akano

VP Product & Operations, B2B

Drives integration with banks and fintechs and operates PAX's partner-success function.

Get in touch

Let's build the AI payment layer for Africa.

Whether you're a bank, a mobile operator, a fintech, or an investor — tell us what you're trying to solve. We respond to every qualified enquiry within 48 hours.