Problem

Touch and Pay Technologies addresses the gap between Africa’s cash-heavy informal economy and conventional digital-payment infrastructure. The company identified a particularly underserved segment of frequent, low-value payments—roughly $0.10 to $10—where transaction values are small but volumes are high. Public transportation is the core use case: commuters otherwise need cash, worry about having the correct fare, and deal with bus conductors, while operators face revenue leakage, manual passenger counting, and limited visibility into demand. TAP said transport operators were losing about 40% of their revenue, making fare collection and reconciliation an economically meaningful problem.

The killer use case is paying for everyday bus, train, and ferry rides without cash. For commuters, the value is speed and convenience; for transport authorities and operators, digitization provides transaction records and passenger-flow data, while reducing opportunities for fare leakage and corruption.

Product / Service

The product is Cowry, a closed-loop payment system combining a contactless NFC prepaid card with the Cowry Wallet app. Users can load the card through bank transfers, cash, or agents, then tap it on a payment terminal to pay for a ride. The app adds online wallet payments, pay-with-phone functionality, route and balance information, and QR-based interactions. A key technical advantage is offline operation: stored value can be transferred from the card to the terminal even when network connectivity is weak, allowing payments to be authorized immediately.

TAP delivers the system through transport operators, terminals, agents, and a reporting backend rather than as a standalone consumer wallet. Its dashboard provides visibility into transactions, settlement, and passenger activity, helping operators plan services and improve accountability. The result is a cashless fare-collection layer designed for environments where smartphones, bank accounts, and reliable internet access are not universal.

Market

Touch and Pay competes in Nigerian fintech payments, transit-ticketing, and closed-loop prepaid cards, with a broader ambition to digitize microtransactions across Africa. It was founded in 2019, joined Y Combinator’s Winter 2022 batch, and is listed as active. Its largest deployment is Lagos, where it is the primary or sole payment technology provider across mass transit services including BRT buses, ferries, and the Blue and Red Line rail systems. Adjacent competitors include large digital-payment companies such as Flutterwave and Paystack, which focus more broadly on larger transactions, while Gona is a closer precedent that attempted to digitize fare payments for informal danfo buses.

The company is clearly post-revenue rather than pre-revenue. In a March 2025 report, TAP said Cowry had surpassed five million users, up from 3.8 million in 2023, that it processed more than ₦20 billion in transactions during 2024, and that it issued 552,000 cards that year. TAP monetizes through a commission on fares, reported at roughly 5% to 10%, and was expanding beyond Lagos into other Nigerian states. The broader closed-loop prepaid-card market also grew sharply from 2021 to 2024, while TAP reported expansion toward Ghana, indicating a substantial but still execution-sensitive opportunity in African transit payments.