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Agentic Payments
Inspiration
Millions of small merchants conduct business through voice messages and chat, often in languages such as Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Efik, and Nigerian Pidgin. Yet most digital payment tools require them to navigate interfaces in English.
We created Hypa Pay to make accepting payments as simple as having a conversation.
What it does
Hypa Pay allows merchants to create, send, and track payment requests using voice, text, or photos in their preferred language.
For example, a merchant can say, "Invoice Ada $50 for two bags," in Yoruba. Hypa's AI interprets the request, prepares a payment draft, and presents the customer, amount, and fees for approval.
Once approved, the system creates a PayPal checkout link. The customer completes payment through PayPal, and Hypa confirms the transaction after receiving a verified webhook.
How we're building it
Hypa Pay combines:
- Hypa Intelligence: Multilingual speech recognition, translation, and conversational AI.
- Model Context Protocol (MCP): Payment tools accessible to Hypa's agent and compatible external AI agents.
- PayPal APIs: Sandbox checkout, order creation, and payment status.
- Secure backend: Explicit merchant approval, server-side validation, and webhook verification.
- Hypa Keyboard and Intelligence App: Natural-language payment experiences inside existing merchant workflows.
Challenges
Our main challenges are understanding payment instructions across languages and accents, correctly extracting transaction details, and preventing AI agents from initiating unintended payments.
We address these through structured payment drafts, explicit human approval, and verified payment confirmations.
What we're learning
Building multilingual payments requires more than translating an interface. AI must understand merchant intent, preserve exact financial details, and maintain a clear boundary between AI-generated suggestions and authorized financial actions.
What's next
Following the hackathon, we plan to expand Hypa Pay into a provider-independent payments platform supporting Stripe, Paystack, and other regional payment providers.
Future capabilities include voice-enabled person-to-person transfers, payment management through Hypa Labs APIs, and payment tools accessible to third-party AI agents.
Our vision: Anyone should be able to participate in digital commerce, regardless of the language they speak.
