KiwiPay, a Laos-based payment solution provider, is set to launch its cashless visa payment system in up to seven African countries, in a move to tap into a growing number of Chinese visitors to Africa.
KiwiPay is currently providing its cashless visa payment solutions to Vientiane’s Wattay International airport for Chinese tourists using Alipay’s facial recognition feature, Techmoran reported.
“The solution has proven the ability to speed up and ease the visa process for tourists. We are now testing the solutions with governments in several other frontier markets in South-East Asia and up to seven countries in Africa,” said Gregory Schmidt, CEO & Founder of Kiwi Group.
More than 900,000 Chinese citizens visited Laos last year, and the government is targeting more than 1.2 million Chinese tourists in 2019.
Over the past few months, Kiwi Group has signed several partnership agreements with local banks and government organizations to provide a cashless solution for visa processing at Laos’s border checkpoints.
In August the company teamed up with Lao Development Bank (LDB) to roll out the Chinese mobile payment platform Alipay, which will allow users to make payments and transactions at stores and restaurants in Laos that are partnered with LDB.
Apart from Alipay, the company provides other foreign services in Laos, such as Alipay, SamsungPay, ApplePay, WeChatPay and more.
KiwiPay, which was established in 2016, is currently processing more than USD 200 million worth of transactions yearly based on a commission fee business model, according to Techmoran.
