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May 25, 2025

Remita processes N60tr transactions, plans expansion to regional markets

By Upfrontdigital News 0 32 Views

Atanda

By Favour Unukaso

PAYMENT technology platform, Remita has revealed plans to extend its services to other African markets.

   Developed by SystemSpecs, which actually started as a payroll feature in an HR application has become a robust ecosystem, Remita currently processes over ₦60 trillion yearly in Nigeria.

    The Managing Director/CEO of Remita Payment Services, Deremi Atanda, who disclosed this, spoke about how indigenous innovation is making global strides.

  “We’ve become an ecosystem of rails, products, and services—robust,” Atanda stated.

   “Layering all of that with the many different customers we’ve had, typically every year we process in excess of maybe ₦60 trillion in transactions in Nigerian Naira. And this can only grow, especially as we begin to think of a vibrant Pan-African expansion. We’re at the fringe of that,” he stated.

   Narrating Remita’s early days, he said: “What many people know today as Remita actually started out as a feature within our HR/payroll application. You process salaries, and you just want to pay—so just remit salaries. And by the way, that’s where the name ‘Remita’ came from: Remittance. We just took out one ‘T’ and left it at ‘A.’ Even the company’s logo carries symbolism of that transformation. “I don’t know if you’ve seen our logo—it has three dots, in ascending size. There are many stories in that logo. It started as a feature, and then we brought it out as a product.”

     According to him, yet the road was not without its bumps. “The first time we brought it out as a product was to bid for the National Pension Commission. This was in 2004, with the PenCom Act. We packaged this into a product in less than two weeks to take care of end-to-end pensions as it was conceived. Trust me, that vision is still viable today. But we lost that bid.”

     Undeterred, he said SystemSpecs pivoted. “We went back and said, ‘What do we do with this asset?’ If it’s not going to work for pensions, let it become a product. And that’s how we renamed pensions.com.ng as Remita, and it became a product.”

   As demand grew, Remita expanded beyond payroll. “Some people want to do their own payroll and just make payments, so let them have a site to go to. Later, it evolved into not just payroll payments. People wanted to do other types of payments. If you want to do non-salary payments, you go to Remita,” he added.

    According to him, today, Remita has fully matured into a standalone company. “So those three things—feature, product, company. That’s been the evolution.”

 

    He said with a Tier 1 licence from the Central Bank of Nigeria, Remita is now a fintech powerhouse. “We do switching, we do payment service provisioning, we do super agency, we do terminals—everything you can think about. We provide some basic services within the payment space, including payment service advisory.”

    A lesser-known chapter of Remita’s growth includes building Nigeria’s first account-to-account switch. “Before TSA, we had built a rail—Nigeria’s first account-to-account switch, worked with all the banks. Not many people know that story. Account-to-account. The front of it, the application, and the rail—first of its kind.”

   On the pivotal Treasury Single Account (TSA) deal with the Federal Government of Nigeria, Atanda revealed, “TSA was a happenstance. The government was looking to solve a problem, and we were looking to get regulated. It’s that term people use—when they say ‘luck,’ it’s just preparation

meeting opportunity.”

    Reflecting on the journey, he added, “These have been some of those moments where you feel validated, where the visionary leadership that set the business up feels the vision is being realized. Today, Remita employs over 300 Nigerians and looks beyond its home shores. “The vision is huge, and we’re committed to that. So, we see exponential growth, and we’re positioning for that.”

   Chairman of DTML, Shina Badaru, said Remita’s story is an inspirational example of local innovation with global relevance. “Remita’s success highlights the critical role of indigenous technology solutions in redefining Africa’s digital economy,” he stated.

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