Visa has purchased a minority stake in Nigerian fintech company Interswitch, valuing the company at USD 1 billion.

Bloomchain.ru reports that Interswitch did not disclose the amount of investment, but Sky News has announced that Visa bought 20% of the company’s shares for USD 200 million.

“It should be noted that regardless of how much Visa has invested, it’s made the investment ahead of Interswitch’s entry into IPO,” Bloomchain.ru said. IPO will take place in the first half of 2020 and Interswitch is expected to place its shares with the London Stock Exchange.

Entrepreneur Mitchell Elegbe founded Interswitch in 2002. The company was one of the first to start building the infrastructure for digitization of Nigeria’s economy, which was based on paper ledgers and cash back then.

Currently, Interswitch is the leading player in the developing financial market of Nigeria. Most online banks in Africa use Interswitch’s services. The fintech company processes over 500,000,000 transactions a month.

Interswitch’s main market, Nigeria is the largest economy in Africa, and its e-payment sector is growing rapidly. The number of card transactions in Nigeria’s points of sale increased by 94% on average between 2013 and 2018.

Apart from providing clearing and payment processing services, Interswitch also owns plastic card provider Verve and payment system Quickteller. In late summer of 2019, Verve launched partnership with U.S.-based fintech company Discover, and now its cards can be used in Discover’s payment system.

It’s noteworthy that a few months prior to Visa’s investment in Interswitch, its direct competitor Mastercard invested USD 300 million in Dubai-based Network International. Thus, Mastercard also invested in a company ahead of its entry into the IPO.

Network International is the largest payment platform in Africa and Middle East. In April of 2019, the company placed shares with London Stock Exchange and raised GBP 1.1 billion while being valued at GBP 2.2 billion.

The partner of Fintech section is