One year ago, we processed our first transaction: a 5,000 UGX mobile money payment from a testing account. Today, RohoPay processes millions of dollars in monthly volume across three countries. The journey has been intense.
Our biggest lesson: reliability is everything in payments. A 99.9% uptime means 8 hours of downtime per year, which would be catastrophic for merchants who depend on us. We now run multi-region infrastructure with automatic failover.
We learned that mobile money networks vary wildly in reliability. MTN MoMo in Uganda has different uptime characteristics than M-Pesa in Kenya. We built automatic provider fallback to route around network outages.
The most unexpected lesson: many merchants want to talk to a human. We launched our sales team after discovering that live chat and phone support significantly increased conversion rates for businesses processing over $10K monthly.
Collin Kooza
Company team
