PayHere processes Rs. 1 b online payments for local businesses

PayHere, a locally built online payment gateway has passed processing Rs. 1 billion of online payments for Sri Lankan businesses. 

PayHere Payment Gateway Service is offered by Sri Lanka’s pioneer financial technology company, PayHere Ltd., in partnership with Sampath Bank PLC under a Central Bank approved special payment acquiring model regulated by CBSL PSD Direction No. 1 of 2018. Within two years, PayHere has reached this milestone by processing online payments from Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, Diners Club, Frimi, Genie, ezCash, mCash and Sampath Vishwa payment options. 

Meanwhile, speaking to Daily FT, PayHere Founder/CEO Dhanika Perera expressed the following: “We started PayHere to challenge the status quo of online payments landscape in Sri Lanka with a home-grown innovative payment gateway solution, as an alternative for long-awaited PayPal, making online payments accessible and affordable for all kinds of local businesses.”

“Our vision has always been to empower every Sri Lankan business with online payments, in order to push our country towards a productive digital economy. We are truly happy to witness this great milestone in our journey towards that vision, despite all the barriers and challenges we passed,” he said.

“While we’re humbly proud to empower more than 2,000 local businesses with online payments acceptance within just about two years, we’re very much honoured to facilitate them to contribute over Rs. 1 billion to the GDP of Sri Lanka, positively impacting our country’s national economy,” he added.

It is notable that as a country, Sri Lanka was lacking a proper solution for online payments for decades. While other countries were moving towards an era of eCommerce and digital payments, this critical payment barrier left Sri Lanka far behind. The local businesses were waiting on false promises of foreign payment solutions such as PayPal & Stripe, but they never got delivered. At such a time, Dhanika Perera, a proven Sri Lankan entrepreneur took the first step to challenge the status quo to find a solution for this. 

As a result PayHere was born in 2016 bringing new hopes to fill the online payments gap. Even though it solved the problem technically, PayHere had to hold its services due to legal barriers in 2017. Never seeing giving up as an option, PayHere partnered with many parties to battle against the legal barriers. Sampath Bank PLC partnered as the Licensed Financial Acquirer and joined the battle in bringing PayHere back. Nation Trust Bank, Dialog Axiata, Mobitel Sri Lanka also joined hands. As a result, PayHere was able to obtain Central Bank approval as a non-bank online payment service provider, the first-of-its-kind in Sri Lanka.

Eventually, with the perseverance of its founder and the great support of its partners and team, PayHere was reborn as Sri Lanka’s first and only aggregated online payment platform in the March of 2018. Since then PayHere introduced many breakthrough payment innovations and simplified solutions to make online payments accessible, affordable and reliable for any kind of local business.

Collaborating with all major payment brands in the country, PayHere exclusively offered a unified payment gateway facility that is capable of processing all payment brands. Seamless integrations with plug and play eCommerce Plugins, mobile SDKs for all mobile platforms and exclusive API support for subscriptions and automated charging were also introduced to ease up the lives of local merchants and their developers.

PayHere also offered a seamless online shopping experience for consumers, enabling them to pay within the merchant websites and mobile apps in a much simpler, faster, and user-friendly way that led to generating higher sales conversions for businesses.

Just two years after its inception, PayHere is now empowering more than 2,000 local businesses in different levels, from startups to top brands, processing over Rs. 1 billion of online payments for them.