Paga, one of Nigeria's oldest fintechs, has opened its Direct Debit service to bank accounts outside its own network. Businesses that use Paga Engine, its payments infrastructure business, can now collect recurring payments from customers who bank with any other Nigerian financial institution, TechCabal reported on 5 November.
Until now, collecting automatically from a customer's account usually meant relying on card rails. Ramon Bello, general manager of Paga Engine, told TechCabal that the new service runs on existing interbank rails that connect one bank to more than a hundred others. "Instead of just a one-time payment, they can now do a recurring payment," he said.
How it works
According to Paga Engine's product page, a business creates an electronic mandate through Paga's API, the customer approves it directly with their own bank, and the business then decides when to trigger each charge on its billing cycle. Paga lists subscriptions, loan repayments, utility bills, insurance premiums and school fees as uses. A digital lender, for example, can take a repayment from a borrower's bank account on the due date instead of waiting for the borrower to send it.
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The launch is part of Paga's push to sell the payment technology it built for itself over nearly two decades to other businesses. Bello said Paga Engine supports more than 400 businesses in manufacturing, fintech, digital content and e-commerce, and processed about $12 billion in transaction value across around 100 million transactions in 2025; these are company figures. Paga Engine also hosts wallets for other businesses.
It puts Paga in direct competition with Paystack, Flutterwave and Zeeh Africa, which already offer automated collections from bank accounts. Bello said Paga is also building tools to let Nigerian businesses collect from international customers through PayPal, building on the January partnership that let Nigerian freelancers receive PayPal payments, and to give businesses access to dollar and euro accounts.
The move follows a leadership change in April, when founder Tayo Oviosu became Paga's group CEO to lead expansion into new markets and Paga Labs, and Ope Oyinloye took over the running of Paga Nigeria as its chief executive, alongside a new group COO role.
