Airtel Money, completing your payment stack

Between MTN and Airtel you cover roughly 95% of Uganda's mobile-money users. Single-rail integrations push 20–30% of your customers to drop off because their wallet isn't supported. The marginal cost of adding the second rail is small relative to the revenue you recover.

Airtel has been more open in recent years, publishing their merchant API publicly and accepting digital onboarding submissions. Approval typically takes 2–3 weeks if your business documents are in order. We handle the technical and compliance paperwork.

Yes — we build a unified abstraction layer in your app so checkout code calls `pay(provider, amount, msisdn)` once and the underlying rails are pluggable. If a future telco launches (or one changes API spec), it's a localised change, not a rewrite.

Both wallets support cross-network sending at the user level, so a customer with an Airtel wallet can pay an MTN merchant code (with the cross-network fee). At the API level we still recommend supporting both rails directly — cleaner UX and lower fees for the customer.

Airtel charges 2.0%–3.5% per collection depending on the merchant agreement, generally a hair lower than MTN. Disbursement is flat-fee. We don't add a markup. Fee comparisons across both rails are part of the post-30-day optimisation pass.

Not natively the way Stripe does. We implement recurring billing application-side: cron job fires a fresh collection request each cycle, retries on failure with dunning notifications, and gracefully cancels after N failed attempts. Same UX, different mechanism.