EBANX has gone live with OPay Direct Debit, enabling global subscription merchants to collect recurring payments via OPay’s wallet in Nigeria.
Brazil-based EBANX has become the first global payments company to go live with OPay Direct Debit, according to the company. The service handles recurring payments inside the digital wallet of Nigeria-based OPay. Under the launch, international subscription businesses can offer OPay at checkout through EBANX. This gives them access to OPay’s 40 million monthly active users, a base the companies say represents one in three adults in Nigeria.
OPay already lets consumers pay through its wallet and by bank transfer. The direct debit function adds recurring collection. Users give a one-time authorisation in the OPay app. After that, merchants can collect later subscription charges without the customer being present or entering payment details again for each transaction.
For merchants, the mechanism replaces the card-on-file model that subscription billing usually relies on. Elizabeth Wang, Chief Commercial Officer at OPay, said the service is aimed at Nigerian consumers paying for global digital services, such as streaming platforms and online tools.
Market context: a card-light economy
The case for the launch rests on how Nigerians pay. To sustain its statements, EBANX cites figures gathered from different resources, as follows: World Bank figures put credit card ownership at 5% of adults, compared with mobile phone penetration of 84%. World Data Lab (WDL) data analysed by EBANX shows that 95% of online spending in Nigeria comes from consumers without a credit card. That share is expected to stay broadly unchanged over the next decade. The same WDL data values Nigeria’s ecommerce market at USD 30 billion and predicts that the country will add 32 million people to its consumer class by 2036. In addition, Payment and Commerce Market Intelligence (PCMI) data indicates that digital wallets and bank transfers together account for 65% of Nigerian ecommerce volume.
Eduardo de Abreu, Chief Product Officer at EBANX, cited Nigeria’s mobile penetration and young, growing population as reasons the company expects the market to remain strategically important within Africa over the next decade. The official described the gap between card ownership and mobile usage as room for global merchants to extend recurring billing beyond cards.
Part of a wider recurring payments strategy
The Nigerian launch follows a similar EBANX project in South Africa. There, Canva became the first international company to offer recurring payments through Capitec Pay’s account-to-account solution, so South African consumers could pay for subscriptions directly from their bank accounts. EBANX presents the OPay integration as an extension of the same approach.
Marin Mignot, Chief Operating Officer at EBANX, said the company builds a separate integration for each local market rather than applying a single model across regions. Mignot identified the mismatch between how consumers pay and the methods merchants have traditionally supported as the company’s main area for growth.
Including Nigeria and South Africa, EBANX now offers recurring alternative payment methods in 13 emerging markets across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The company estimates that these markets give global merchants potential access to more than 1 billion consumers who rely on local methods such as digital wallets and account-to-account transfers.
