Before “Pay With Bank Transfer” became one of the most widely adopted payment experiences in African fintech, Flutterwave saw the shift coming.
In 2019, African consumers were already moving money through bank transfers every day. They trusted it. They understood it. They used it for everything from family support to business payments and high-value transactions.
But digital commerce had not caught up. Businesses could receive transfers into their bank accounts, but they struggled to identify customers, reconcile transactions, confirm payments instantly, or build scalable checkout experiences around bank transfers. The infrastructure simply did not exist at scale. Flutterwave changed that.
On May 29th, 2019 at exactly 6:23 PM WAT, Flutterwave launched the beta version of Pay With Bank Transfer to selected merchants, becoming the first fintech in Nigeria to build and launch a structured checkout experience around instant bank transfers.
At the time, many in the industry were still focused almost entirely on cards. We chose to build around how Africans were already paying.
Building for Real Consumer Behaviour
The data was impossible to ignore. By the first five months of 2019 alone, transactions processed through NIBSS Instant Payments had already reached ₦41.48 trillion, representing a 36% year-on-year increase.
Customers were already telling the market what they wanted. They wanted payment methods they trusted; simplicity, speed and increasingly, they preferred bank transfers for high-value payments.
Flutterwave understood something early that would later reshape African payments: the future of digital payments in Africa would not be built by forcing new behavior. It would be built by digitizing existing behavior at scale. That insight became the foundation for Pay With Bank Transfer.
Turning Bank Transfers Into Checkout Infrastructure
Flutterwave transformed ordinary bank transfers into a fully integrated payment experience. For customers, the experience felt simple and familiar. They selected “Pay With Bank Transfer” at checkout, received a virtual bank account number, completed the transfer through their banking app or USSD channel, and received confirmation almost instantly. The process took less than three minutes. For merchants, however, this was revolutionary.
For the first time, businesses could accept bank transfers with real-time confirmation, automated reconciliation, payment tracking, customer insights, and centralized visibility alongside cards, USSD, and other payment methods. Flutterwave had effectively turned one of Africa’s most trusted payment behaviors into scalable digital commerce infrastructure.
The Market Responded Immediately
Following a successful beta rollout in May 2019, Flutterwave commercially launched Pay With Bank Transfer on June 27th, 2019. The response was immediate. Within the first nine weeks alone, Flutterwave processed more than 20,000 transactions with an almost 100% success rate.
At a time when failed card payments, authentication friction, and online trust concerns slowed digital commerce, Pay With Bank Transfer solved a massive problem. Customers embraced it because it felt safer and more familiar. Merchants embraced it because transaction success rates improved dramatically, especially for high-value payments.
What began as a bold infrastructure experiment quickly became one of the most important payment methods on Flutterwave’s platform. And eventually, the rest of the industry followed.
As adoption accelerated, businesses across fintech, travel, commerce, and remittances, integrated Pay With Bank Transfer into their checkout experiences. Within a year, Flutterwave had processed more than 400,000 successful transactions through the product.
Flutterwave had pioneered a new payment category in African fintech: account-to-account checkout infrastructure built around local consumer behavior. That vision would expand beyond Nigeria into Ghana in March 2025 and much later, South Africa..
Bringing Pay With Bank Transfer to Ghana
In March 2025, Flutterwave expanded Pay With Bank Transfer into Ghana through the launch of Static and Dynamic Virtual Accounts. Once again, Flutterwave moved early, launching this technology in yet another new country.
The infrastructure enabled businesses in and outside Ghana to accept seamless bank transfer and mobile money payments while unlocking faster settlements, higher transaction limits, easier reconciliation, and more scalable payment experiences.
Dynamic Virtual Accounts powered one-time checkout transactions, while Static Virtual Accounts enabled recurring and dedicated customer payments.
The market responded quickly. In H1 2025, Flutterwave’s Pay With Bank Transfer launch in Ghana delivered 26% more growth than other alternative payment methods on Flutterwave, in the country. Today, it is one of the fastest-growing payment methods on Flutterwave in Ghana.
Bringing Pay With Bank Transfer to South Africa
Following the success of Pay with Bank Transfer in Ghana, we have now expanded the solution to selected merchants in South Africa in December of 2025.
In South Africa, bank transfers play a significant role in everyday commerce. Reports by BankServ Africa and the South African Multiple Option Settlement (SAMOS), show that account-to-account (A2A) payments currently account for approximately 22% of South Africa’s e-commerce transaction value and are projected to grow further over the next few years.
This growth is being accelerated by the launch of PayShap by the South African Reserve Bank, which has introduced real-time payment infrastructure designed to modernise instant bank transfers across the country.
Although cards remain dominant, there is a clear and growing opportunity for Pay with Bank Transfer in South Africa. The country combines high bank account penetration, a mature banking ecosystem, strong smartphone adoption, and a consumer base already comfortable with EFTs and digital banking.
Together, these trends create strong conditions for the adoption of seamless bank transfer payments, particularly as merchants seek more cost-efficient, reliable, and fraud-resistant alternatives to cards.
Still Building the Future
Today, businesses across Africa use Flutterwave to accept payments through bank transfers, cards, mobile money, Apple Pay, Google Pay, USSD, and many other payment methods.
But Pay With Bank Transfer represents something much bigger than a payment feature.It represents Flutterwave’s belief that African payments infrastructure should be built for African realities.
From pioneering Pay With Bank Transfer in Nigeria in 2019 to scaling the infrastructure into Ghana in 2025, Flutterwave has continued to build products that meet Africans where they already are. And we’re just getting started.