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VoguesPay.com, an integrated online payment company has won the Best Emerging Online Gateway Award in Africa at the Third West African Telecommunication Summit.

Vogues Pay was the only African startup APP which made it to the top to win the coveted prize.

Vogues Pay International which was founded in 2012 is a company that runs a secure payment processor in Africa for the purpose of easy trading.

Speaking in an interview on the sideline of the Awards, Michael Simeon, Co-founder of VoguesPay says, ‘’ VoguesPay is a payment processing company set up to help businesses collect and process virtual money. It started from Nigeria now spreading throughout Africa. We are empowering Small & Medium Scale Enterprises (SMEs) to reach a wider audience ''

Similarly, on the question of why they are participating in the Third West Africa Telecommunication summit, he says that, West Africa is a potentially huge market for doing business with over 400 Million population and so their short, medium and longtime plan is to extend their services to Ghana, West Africa and Africa at large. We were invited to participate in the summit because we are coming into the Ghanaian Market.’’

Furthermore, VoguesPay also seeks to find a synergy between Ghana and Nigeria and build partnership on a common strength in doing business with the rest of the world and to give SMEs in the country a very efficient payment platform at no upfront cost to their budget. The company also wants to open the market up for both SMEs and large companies.

E-commerce in Africa as admitted by Mr. Femi Simeon is the fastest growing sector in Africa and a few of such SMEs in this industry have been identified in Ghana but a decision he says is yet to be taken whether VoguesPay will be working with them.

Similarly, the idea is to work with those startups to do business because a lot of Nigerians buy from Ghana and therefore it is important to get a platform that helps them do that without a limitation on Capacity.

He was optimistic that startups in Africa can grow and affect positively how business is done in Africa. Also, there is a unique opportunity for Africa to grow because we need everything; we have the potential to grow as massive but we can only grow if we are trading with each other. We can only dribble each other when we do business together, you can pay me in Cedis, and I can pay you with Naira. This is what VoguesPay is all about, it’s allowing you trade in your currency so you can give strength to your currency’’, he illustrated.

Finally, he noted that governments create the enabling environment to do business but government doesn’t often have the solutions of solving problems.

The award is organized by Instinct Wave Ltd., publishers of Africa’s only free premium ICT and telecoms magazine, Mobile World. Akin Naphtal, who is the CEO of Instinct Wave; the organizer of the event, remarked that VoguePay won the industry recognition as a result of their contribution to online payment in Nigeria and Africa in general.