Mark Essien, the founder and CEO of Hotels.ng, a leading hotel booking site in Nigeria, might have found a ‘needle in an haystack.
He just announced that his company has moved its payment needs to @paystack, a payment startup with offices in Lagos and the United States. On his Twitter handle @MarkEssien, he said “Hotels.ng now only has one payment gateway for all Visa/Mastercard: @paystack. All the begging from the banks won’t make us change. He specifically mentioned the reason for his decision. Happy not to deal with all the interswitch (sic) troubles anymore. And since @paystack became gateway, payment volume significantly up.”
To allay the fears that a startup like Paystack, might pose challenges of bugs and technical glitches, he said “And yes, we’ve done the stress-testing for you. It’s good. So if you are in Nigeria and need a payment gateway, use @paystack. I don’t advocate products without testing. @paystack has been Hotels.ng exclusive payment gateway for more than a month already.
PageOne reached out to Mark on Twitter via his rationale and he said “Other payment gateways had too many failures and too many steps in payment process. Paystack solves that.”
How Interswitch will react to this development is yet to be seen. Mark Essien is influential in his own way, his bold statement on leaving Interswitch as a payment gateway might influence other startups who look up to him. Speculations are rife that Mark has a shareholding interest in Paystack.
Hotels.ng is competing head on with Jumia’s sibling company, Jovago.com. Slimtrader, HotelOga and others competing for different segments of the hotel booking market.
On several occasions, interswitch debits my account and fail to make a refund. In fact, the last incidence caused me to head to their twitter page and I was shocked to see that a lot of people are also facing the same problem with interswitch. What even surprises me the most is that they no longer reply my emails ( not even a simple “we’re working on it).
It’s too bad.
I as a developer will preach paystack to my clients henceforth.