Short answer: if your customers pay by bank transfer, Chapa is the wrong gateway for you. It wasn't built for that problem, and you pay 2.5% on every transaction while you find out. This page makes the case with numbers, and every claim is sourced at the bottom. Facts checked on 18 August 2026.
What Chapa is
Chapa Financial Technologies is an Addis Ababa payment gateway founded in 2020 and live since August 2022, with a National Bank of Ethiopia "POS & Payment Gateway Operator" licence. It aggregates cards (Visa, Mastercard), PayPal, mobile wallets, and bank transfers behind one API, and claims 1,000+ businesses and 30B+ ETB in processed volume.
That breadth is its pitch. The question is whether it's the tool for your problem.
Where Chapa falls short for you
It takes a cut of every transaction, for money that never touches it
Chapa publishes its fee: 2.5% per successful domestic transaction. On a 1,000 ETB order that's 25 ETB. On a 10,000 ETB order it's 250 ETB. Forever, on every order, for as long as you stay, and the percentage doesn't shrink as you grow.
Worse, the percentage doesn't reflect the work. The customer's money still has to reach your account somehow, and Chapa charges its cut regardless of what that service actually costs.
Payo's price reflects the actual work, because the actual work is verification, not moving money:
- Free. No setup fees, no monthly fees, no per-transaction fees.
- Advanced features are planned for the future, and those will be paid.
- Everything in the current service stays free.
The customer transfers straight to your bank account, so there's no settlement to float and no percentage to justify.
You go through a business-license and verification process before you can go live
Chapa's onboarding is built for registered businesses: submit your business license and other documentation, wait through their verification process, then go live. That's days or weeks between deciding to sell and accepting money, and it stops developers who just want to test an idea.
Payo skips the queue. Sign up, get an API key, POST an order, and you're accepting payments the same hour. No business license needed to start.
Its rails don't match how your customers actually pay
Chapa's headline rails are cards and PayPal. Most Ethiopian customers have neither. The rail they use every day is the bank app: CBE, Telebirr, Abyssinia. There, Chapa's official wallet integrations cover Telebirr and CBE Birr, but you still get a redirect-style checkout, not the receipt flow your customer is already in.
That flow, pay in the bank app, come back, upload the receipt, is what Payo is built entirely around. The customer never leaves the rail they're already using, and you get a verified confirmation instead of a redirect through a hosted checkout.
Fees, side by side
| Chapa | Payo | |
|---|---|---|
| Domestic fee | 2.5% per successful transaction (official) | Free. No setup, monthly, or per-transaction fees |
| International fee | 1% (official) | Not applicable. ETB transfers only. |
| Setup / monthly | None (official) | None |
| Settlement | Automatic, within 24 hours (official) | No settlement at all. The customer pays your account directly. |
So the question is simple: give away 2.5% of every order forever, or pay nothing on the rail your customers actually use?
Payo vs Chapa at a glance
| Chapa | Payo | |
|---|---|---|
| What it processes | Cards, wallets, PayPal, bank transfers | Bank-transfer receipts (CBE, Telebirr, Abyssinia) |
| Verification | Payment confirmed by Chapa via the bank or wallet API | OCR auto-approve plus human review of the receipt |
| Webhooks | Documented | HMAC-SHA256 signed, retried up to 24h |
| Where the money flows | Through Chapa's settlement | Straight from customer to your account |
| Getting started | Business license plus verification first | Sign up, get an API key, POST an order. No license needed. |
| Cost | 2.5% of every transaction | Free. Paid advanced features are planned for later |
The verdict
The one case for Chapa: you need international cards or PayPal. Diaspora customers, tourists, buyers outside Ethiopia. That's real, and Payo doesn't pretend to serve it.
For the way your Ethiopian customers actually pay, the case collapses: a redirect through a hosted checkout instead of staying in the bank app, 2.5% on every transaction, and a license-verification gate before your first order.
Choose Payo when:
- Your customers pay by bank transfer (CBE, Telebirr, Abyssinia) and you want each payment verified against the receipt before your webhook fires.
- You want to keep your revenue: Payo is free, not a percentage of every order.
- You want to be live today. No business license, no approval queue, just an API key and a curl command.
- You want the money to go straight from your customer to your account, with no third party holding it in between.
And if you do have international customers, you don't have to pick: run Chapa for cards and Payo for bank transfers on the same checkout. The bank-transfer lane, the one most of your customers will use, costs you nothing on Payo.
Sources
- Chapa pricing — fees and settlement, accessed 18 Aug 2026
- Chapa developer docs — API, sandbox, webhooks, SDKs, accessed 18 Aug 2026
- Chapa about page — founding, team, accessed 18 Aug 2026
- NBE-licensed payment system operators — licence status, accessed 18 Aug 2026
- Shega — Chapa gateway launch coverage — launch date and context