What is lomi.?
lomi. is an open-source payment processing platform built specifically for francophone West African businesses operating in the West African Economic and Monetary Union (UEMOA). We seamlessly integrate the most popular payment methods while providing a comprehensive set of localized e-commerce products.
Our platform empowers ventures to focus on growth without worrying about the challenges of payment processing and billing. We aim to solve two core challenges:
Payment complexity
The West African payment landscape is very fragmented, with numerous payment providers. This complexity often forces merchants to manage integrations themselves or rely on closed-source payment providers, leading to increased development time, high transaction costs, maintenance overhead, and technical debt.
lomi. solves this by providing:
- A set of APIs: One integration for all your payment needs, allowing you to accept credit card payments, MTN 'Momo', Wave Mobile Money, Orange Money, SPI (64+ Mobile Money Operators and Banks), and more (we are continuously expanding our set of integrations to help you reach an ever-growing set of consumers in West Africa and beyond).
- A comprehensive dashboard: Web-hosted back-office for business management to help you sell goods, services, subscriptions, and anything in between.
- A mobile app: A soft POS system to help you sell to your customers on the go and withdraw your earnings quickly and easily.
- Control: Streamlined transaction reconciliation, refunds, and payouts to your local or international bank accounts or mobile money wallets. Customizable and seamless checkout products to boost conversion: embeddable payment elements, hosted checkout sessions, ready to send payment links, or direct charge APIs to build exactly what you need. Analytics and reporting to help you understand your business and customers better after each sale.
Get started touching francophone West Africa today by creating an account.
Lack of transparency
The financial technology landscape in West Africa has historically suffered from opacity in operations, high and hidden fees, and limited visibility into transaction processing. Merchants often struggle with black-box payment processors that are slow to integrate, have high fees, are not regulated, and provide little insight into how their money moves.
lomi. addresses this through:
- Robust logic and security: Full transparency into transaction flows, fee structures, and transaction/payout processing.
- Open-source architecture: 80% of our codebase is public, allowing anyone to review, audit, and contribute to our software — see our codebase structure for more details.
- Community governance: Transparent roadmap and decision-making process with merchant input via pull requests and feature requests as GitHub issues.
- Built-in compliance:
- In fieri licensed payment service provider from the BCEAO (Banque Centrale des États de l'Afrique de l'Ouest)
- Regular security updates and compliance monitoring
- PCI DSS level 4 compliant
- Build on top of Stripe and GIM for credit card payment processing.
- GDPR AND MACP compliant with 100% of our data flows transiting through Cape Town in South Africa and Dublin in Ireland.
Our platform is designed with security-first principles, ensuring that both merchants and their customers can transact with confidence.
How we deliver
To ensure merchants can easily leverage our products to address these two core challenges, we provide:
Developer-first approach
- Well-documented APIs with comprehensive examples and robust error handling.
- SDKs in popular languages (TypeScript, Python, PHP and Go).
- Extensive integration guides and ready-to-use boilerplates for multiple use cases built on top of modern and popular technologies such as Vite, Next.js, Sanity, Postgres,and more.
- CLI tool to help you manage your integrations and your business finances directly from the terminal.
- 24/7 dedicated customer support with technical assistance and a dedicated support line to help you get started fast.
Our commitments
- Making our entire codebase public and self-hostable.
- Performing regular security audits and enhancing application extensibility.
- Building a secure, compliant, and sustainable payment infrastructure.
- Giving back to the local tech ecosystem.
- Growing alongside our developers.
- Driving continuous innovation and improvement.
Join our open-source community on GitHub, give us a star and help us shape the future of payments in our region and open-source in Africa!