How KongaPay migrated 50K accounts and 2M transactions from an in-house platform to Skaleet with no downtime
- Sector Marketplace
- Country Nigeria
- Use case In-house IT to Skaleet migration
KongaPay, Nigerian payment solution
As Nigeria's leading e-commerce platform and the 4th most-visited marketplace in Africa, Konga serves over 4 million users and handles 100 million transactions annually. The platform gathers retailers offering a wide range of products, from household appliances and electronics to groceries and fashion. Since its founding in 2012, Konga has stood out by providing services tailored to Nigeria, including fast, secure delivery to rural and remote areas. Konga also distinguishes itself with its innovative, secure online payment solutions.
KongaPay, an innovative solution developed by Konga, provides customers with a versatile digital wallet, seamless online payment options for the Konga marketplace, efficient money transfers, and convenient bill payment services. It also empowers merchants with POS solutions, payment gateways, and business banking services to streamline operations and drive growth. To further enhance its value, KongaPay focuses on incentivizing customers to adopt its platform, reducing reliance on intermediaries while delivering a seamless, secure, and rewarding payment experience. By continuously innovating and providing unmatched convenience, KongaPay is strengthening its position as a trusted partner for individuals and businesses alike.
The challenge of scaling with an entire in-house solution
Konga had built an in-house solution to support KongaPay, but decided that revisiting the buy or build decision and deciding on a hybrid “buy and build” approach would enable more volume during promotional periods which the in-house solution was unable to cope with. The large number of customers on the platform posed performance problems with major impact on customer satisfaction, as well as on the acquisition of new customers and merchants.
Migrated to Skaleet's scalable platform
KongaPay employed a hybrid model where they were able to replace its core ledger yet retain an ecosystem of other in-house built modules, such as its front-end and payment gateway modules. During the migration, the Konga in-house platform and Skaleet's platform ran side-by-side, with transactions being synchronized asynchronously so that KongaPay could be migrated without downtime and without requiring KongaPay to download a new application.
KongaPay chose Skaleet for its long and extensive experience in the African market and ease of integration. Working with Skaleet opened up a whole new world of possibilities. KongaPay now manages interoperability with a partner bank that handles cross transactions and was able to integrate with its interoperability partner and Skaleet in under an hour.
We chose Skaleet because it provided us the perfect balance between flexibility and scalability through a hybrid ‘buy and build’ model. This approach allowed us to leverage an advanced core banking platform while retaining the ability to customize and innovate to suit our unique needs. The platform’s proven track record in Africa demonstrated its adaptability to the dynamic and fast-growing financial services landscape in the region, which aligns perfectly with our growth objectives.
KongaPay successfully migrated 2 million transactions from their in-house IT system. KongaPay has acquired 20% more customers since they switched to Skaleet, and the number of transactions has increased by 15%.
Additionally, Skaleet’s rapid time-to-market capabilities enabled us to launch innovative solutions faster than traditional development approaches, giving us a competitive edge in an industry where agility is key. With Skaleet, we’ve been able to ensure operational resilience, scalability for future growth, and a superior customer experience—all underpinned by a robust and compliant infrastructure.
Martin Della Chiesa, Co-CEO at Skaleet, talks about the collaboration between KongaPay and Skaleet:
Skaleet is very proud to support the growth of Kongapay, and the development of Konga in the embedded finance category in one of the fastest moving country on the planet.
