EcoBank opens up APIs to African businesses and developers

After a pilot earlier this year, EcoBank’s Pan-African Banking Sandbox is now accessible to Africa’s fintech community. The Sandbox allows Fintechs to access Ecobank’s Application Programming Interface (APIs) for the development of solutions.

What will innovators be able to do?

The sandbox is available on request and once granted access you’ll be connected to Ecobank’s Unified API. This will allow developers and businesses to do the following;

• Facilitate QR code payments via Ecobank Pay;
• Accept card payments including VISA & Mastercard;
• Accept mobile money payments;
• Connect directly to Ecobank to make corporate payments;
• APIs to make payments to bank accounts and mobile money wallets;
• APIs to connect payments to Ecobank’s agent network;
• API for you to send money across Ecobank’s 33 African country-network with Rapidtransfer.

It’s great to see banks and other companies on the continent look to solve the problem of API access. MTN recently launched Chenosis – an API marketplace for the African continent.

If other businesses are to follow suit, it will make it extremely simple for innovators on the continent to build products. Just browsing through the Chenosis marketplace, I couldn’t find the Ecobank APIs.

If other businesses launch their APIs and Chenosis continues to get shunned, that might mean Chenosis never becomes the one-stop-shop Chenosis it’s trying to become.

Register for access to Ecobank’s Unified API here