Paystack Forays into Personal Banking With Zap

The firm is betting on making transfers easy and faster as it makes a shift into consumers after primarily serving businesses.

“Zap is a consumer app for instant, secure payments through bank transfers. Built on the same trusted infrastructure that powers millions of transactions daily,” the company tweeted on X.

According to the chief executive of the firm, Mr Shola Akinlade, during the launch on Monday, the product allows users to send money to any Nigerian bank account within 10 – 30 seconds.

Customers can fund their Zap account by linking their Nigerian bank accounts to Zap using Paystack’s direct debit infrastructure or depositing money directly into a Paystack-Titan account.

According to him, transfers have become a feature of daily life and delays can be frustrating.

So the new app will be solely focusing on transfers and for now, won’t include other services like airtime and data recharge or electricity token payments.

Business Post gathered that the company is banking on its relationship with Titan Trust to make it possible for Zap to hold deposits.

However, the app is limited to only commercial bank accounts which can be linked through Paystack Vault. So account numbers like like OPay, PalmPay, and Moniepoint are excluded from the list of supported institutions.

Users can also link debit or credit cards from any country to Zap.

Customers can only send or deposit money on the app after completing know-your-customer (KYC) checks. Tier-1 users, who verify with only their Bank Verification Number (BVN), can send up to N50,000 daily and maintain a maximum balance of N200,000.

For Tier-2 users, who must provide a selfie, physical address, and National Identification Number (NIN), the limits rise to N200,000 daily and N500,000 maximum balance. Tier-3 users can send up to N5 million daily and hold up to N100 million in their accounts after verifying their address.

In a product test, our correspondent tested the service and found that users can only be onboarded using an invitation code, which has been considered a method of making it effective to spread the app.

Although it has a very fast transfer mechanism, users question whether it will be able to offer proper incentives like its older and previously established competitors.