United Bank for Africa Plc (UBA), has introduced U-bills – an online payment and collection platform which would help boost E-commerce in Africa. U-bills is a collection and bill payment platform which allows sellers to get paid online or on mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones. U-bills is a one-stop platform for customers to make payments for goods and services on their mobile phones, tablets or personal computers as long as they have an internet connection on their device.
Yinka Adedeji, the Divisional Head, e-banking UBA said, “The uniqueness of the U-Bills platform is that it is a single payment gateway where all forms of payments to different merchants can be made. It is not a single-merchant platform. All merchants can register on U-Bills to receive payments for goods and services. Also, anyone can go online and register to make payments for goods and services bought.”
U-bills would serve as a platform where customers are given the flexibility to make online payments anytime of the day or night or week to sellers for goods bought or services rendered. He continued, “This means, it no longer matters where you are in the world. So far you are African and are from any of the countries where UBA is, you can now pay your bills, top up phones of your loved ones and still pay for services without moving an inch.”
In a statement from UBA during the weekend, it explained that the online payments platform has been enabled in all 19 countries where the bank is currently present and that customers registered on the platform can recharge their mobile phones, pay their cable TV bills quickly and pay their utility bills in any of the 19 countries in Africa where UBA presently operates.
A list of some top merchants that have registered on U-Bills to receive payments was released in the statement and it included leading telecom operators like MTN (top-up and post paid) Etisalat, Glo and Airtel. Other service providers currently registered on the U-Bills platform include Financial Reporting Council of Nigeria (FRCN), Abuja Geographic Information Systems, and Bells University of Technology Limited among others.
