GTCO’s fintech business, Squad, crossed N200bn transactions in January 2023\

Guaranty Trust Hol ding Co Plc (GTCO) has disclosed that its fintech business, Squad by HabariPay achieved a milestone in January this year as it crossed N200 billion in monthly transactions. According to the bank, Squad, which started operation in June 2022, also became profitable in the first month.

GTCO disclosed this in its 2022 full-year investor presentation. The bank added that Squad, which targets micro-merchants, SMEs, large corporates, and Techstars, recorded N926 million in the first 6 months of its operations, while its revenue for the period stood at N1.52 billion.

Between June and December 2022, GTCO said Squad a total of N139.3 billion through its Gateway and Switching System, while international payments transactions within the period stood at $175,927.

Squad, a digital payment product of HabariPay, a subsidiary of GTCO Plc, was created to simplify payments. According to the Chief Technical Officer at HabariPay, John Babawale, since its launch in June 2022, the market’s response to Squad has been positive, and HabariPay has been witnessing a steady adoption of the product by businesses of different scales.

“It is apparent that there is indeed a gap in the availability of affordable payment solutions that can simplify the facets of financial management that businesses need, and Squad is helping to make this a reality. Though this product has only been in the market for a few months, we are excited to see how much businesses are steadily adopting it to help simplify their daily business processes. We have successfully onboard 30,000+ merchants and counting, with more opportunities to onboard in newer markets on the continent,” he said.

The birth of HabariPay started with GTBank’s launch of the Habari mobile app in 2018 as a digital platform for music, shopping, lifestyle content, and others. GTCO secured the final approval from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) for HabariPay Limited as a wholly-owned payment subsidiary.

HabariPay had hit the ground running with the launch of Squad, a digital payments platform to provide customers with the tools to do business digitally. HabariPay’s Squad, which has a Switching and Processing licence from the CBN and a Value Added Service (VAS) licence from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) is now competing with the likes of Interswitch, Paystack, Flutterwave in the same arena.