Few days ego. I google How to Pay for Online Subscription and what i saw looks like it might work. It try it out but failed
It all started after the first wave of restrictions by the Nigerian financial authorities in 2020. If you wanted to pay for online services, it became a challenge as people experienced an increase in failed transactions when using Naira debit cards. If you needed to pay for a course online, pay for Facebook ads, shop from international stores, pay for your web hosting service, or renew your music streaming subscription. It became way tougher than the simpler times of just completing your card details and making payments. There were just different restrictions depending on your bank or card service.
All this is linked to the staggering reality that the CBN simply doesn’t have enough US. Dollars or FX of forex to meet the demands from Nigerians CBN’s tool to corp the demand for dollars is to place restrictions. And this is meant to be a good thing for Nigeria. Restrictions on imports and restrictions on card spending. Limits which affect your ability to pay online or pay for online subscriptions were put in place.
Here’s how it works: when you try to make a payment online from your Naira account, your bank deducts the narrow equivalent from your bank account and pays the vendor with dollar sourced from the CBN. But now the CBN is saying, hey, we aren’t going to have any of that anymore. Times are hard. Dollar is cut by how did we get here? Let’s try to create a timeline of events in if you had a UBA card, according to a cable article, you could spend $15,000 in a month with your Narrative card in April of 2020.
This article shows up on Business day that Nara has weakened to 412 naira to one door, and many banks reduced their spending limit for international transactions from three thousand dollars to one thousand dollars per month on the Narrative, whether it’s for 80 mPOS or online transactions. Basically, what they said is that you’ve only got $1,000 a month to spend from your Narrative card in July of 2020. Just three months later that same year, the CBN directed Nigerian banks to reduce the spending limits on their debit cards. Banks responded by dropping the limits. Some banks brought it to as low as $100 a month.
And all this was in order to reduce the risk of foreign settlement difficulties. You see, if we as Nigeria can’t pay what we owe and we don’t have enough dollars because people are taking so much of it, that becomes a problem. Now, fast forward to March of 2022 and things have gotten even tighter as banks have further limited dollar spending on America to as low as $20. Yes, $20 in a month. Around this period, many narratives just stopped working completely on international payments.
It was rather shocking because payments for certain subscriptions even cost less than $20. Still, most naira cards weren’t working on those platforms. Despite the fact that it cost less than $20. All right, so virtual dollar cards issued by fintech companies came to the rescue. Partner by Shutter we’ve ever sent Payday and other virtual card providers.
They became the go to service providers when you wanted to pay for one international subscription or the other. And they didn’t even charge the bank rate. Many of them used the power rate, and it was expensive. What people used it is at last, right? Not really, because most of the virtual cards stopped working in June due to an update from their partners.
It was back to square one for most people that thought that they had finally solved their international payment issues. Things even got worse when some banks issued a total suspension of international transactions on their Narrative’s, and this happened in August and September. Now, I should say that certain banks and cards are still working for some international payments. For instance, a writer can pay for his YouTube Premium subscription with his Any Bank Verf card. You can pay for Apple Music and Spotify with some other narrow cards.
At this point, it might just be to try out different cards from different banks on different platforms and cross your fingers hoping that this works. But this begs the question how many bank accounts will you have to open hoping that the card works and the bank doesn’t eventually suspend international transactions? Again, doom and gloom aside, one solution to most international payments issue is using a dollar denominated card that is linked to your Domicillery account. However, in this case, the challenge lies in opening that Domicillery account in the first place. For those that don’t have work, you need referees that have an account, that have a current account.
There is an opening balance that some banks require, like a $100 minimum. And then you have to pay maintenance fees, which can be very expensive for most people, especially if you don’t earn in dollars. The bigger issue is that funding that account with USD even more headache. If you prefer not to leave things to chance or to traditional banks, there are two main methods to walk around these things, and they are vetrocads, as we said before, and payment apps. One of the more common ways I’ve seen that people use a lot to pay for services is with apps like Binance Pay.
I’ve talked about Finance Pay on on one of my post here, For instance, for Apple subscriptions, instead of having to use a Naira card now, you can buy a gift card instead. You can take that gift card, load it onto your account, and not have to worry about any card again, all your subscriptions will be taken from the balance that you have on your phone, and it works effortlessly. Although for this to work well, you might need to change your location, your apple’s location to one that supports the gift card location. For example, if you want to buy a gift card that works in the US, you might have to change your Apple ID location to the US with the app too.
You can buy Airtime gaming cards for Minecraft and PUBG gift cards from Asos, which is like a shopping site that I use for all my total necks, and they deliver from the UK and engineering like three days, which is why I like them. Asos you can buy gift cards that work on Junior, the Ecommerce Store, Spa and Shop Right, which are actual physical stores that you can buy their vouchers from. Here. You can book hotels on the app with Hotels.com and you can get an Uber.com voucher to pay for your trips. You can pay for Spotify on here, buy Airtime from your network providers like I mentioned, Empty and Airtel and Go.
You can book flights, you can pay for your electricity bill with the Kenya Electric. In fact, the list goes on and on and I’ll leave a link in the description below to download the app and just experience it for yourself. On the other hand, there are virtual dollar cards that you can use to make international payments. One of the companies is a fund or virtual card. You can pay for ads on Facebook, you can buy goods on Alibaba, AliExpress, Amazon, and you can even pay for subscriptions on Apple, Pay and Netflix.
All you need to do is open an account with your bio data, link any of your other bank accounts, and provide your bank verification number your BBM. Another company that tries to do something similar is Cheaper Cash with their Cheaper Cash virtual cards, and they have been a huge help to a number of existing users to help them shop online and pay for online services. And you can even invest in stocks in your app. Interesting, there are many other apps that we found, but some of them can’t let you pay for Apple subscriptions, so we didn’t put them on this list. However, they’re able to help you pay for other subscriptions online and shop online without limits.
Big advice though I’d recommend that you try to read all these apps terms and conditions. For instance, for Cheaper cash, the exchange rate might be a bit too high for users, it pays to sort of know what you’re comfortable with and how far you can go. Just like I mentioned earlier, if you are someone who earns dollars and you have a Dominicular account, you might not even have half of these worries that I’ve mentioned in this video. However, for people who are earning in narrow and are looking for other means to pay for international services online, these options should work really well. Click here to watch our video on Only by US Pay tutorial so you can get more information on
