Progressive Web App Concept for Payment

A few months ago when I visited Lagos, Nigeria, I was impressed with how much digital payment was being used, particularly at point of sale.

As the city of Lagos continues to move towards a cashless economy there are still a lot of businesses (solo-prenuers) that are excluded from the transformation due to the following factors:

Cost of POS devices

Low or no education

Lack of smartphones

Poor service, network issues and internet connection

Unreliable electricity to ensure POS is always charged

A combination of PWA (Progressive Web APP) and QR code lets merchants accept payment easily. They are able to receive payment without a POS machine, electricity, internet connection as they have passed all these responsibilities to the devices to the users.

This approach allows for super fast adoption as users and merchants need no cost of installation. Users are not required to pre-install any application to use the PWA app on their smartphone browser. This payment system also requires little or no interaction between merchants and users making for contact free transactions.

The experience I described above has led me to design the prototype above. I am still researching the feasibility of the idea.