# Wave Mobile Money

**Canonical:** https://apis.io/providers/wave-mobile-money/  
**Website:** https://www.wave.com  
**APIs profiled:** 5

Wave is a Dakar, Senegal-headquartered mobile money company on a mission to "make Africa the first cashless continent." Founded by Drew Durbin and Lincoln Quirk (who previously built the Sendwave remittance service) and publicly launched in Senegal in 2018, Wave provides a smartphone- and agent-based wallet that lets users deposit and withdraw cash for free and send money domestically for a flat 1% fee — roughly 70% cheaper than the telco-led mobile money incumbents in the region. Wave operates today in Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Uganda, Mali, Burkina Faso, and The Gambia, working through a dense network of human agents alongside the Wave app and a separate Wave Business portal for merchants and enterprises. In September 2021, Wave raised a USD 200M Series A led by Sequoia Heritage, Founders Fund, Stripe, and Ribbit at a USD 1.7B valuation — the largest Series A ever raised on the African continent at the time. For developers, Wave exposes a tier-1 B2B platform via api.wave.com, documented at docs.wave.com, with Checkout (hosted payment sessions), Payout (single and batch disbursements, reversals, recipient verification), Balance & Reconciliation (wallet balance, transactions, refunds), Aggregated Merchants (sub-merchant management for aggregators and PSPs), and Webhooks with HMAC-SHA256 signing for asynchronous event delivery. API keys are scoped per-API, support IP allowlisting and optional request signing, and the platform enforces idempotency on POST mutations.

## Kin Score — 23.9 / 100 (emerging)

Scored 2026-08-21 under rubric 0.12.0. Trend: flat (+0.0 from 23.9).

| Facet | Score |
|---|---|
| Discoverability | 74.1 |
| Contract Quality | 0.0 |
| Governance | 0.0 |
| Contract Governance | 0.0 |
| Operational Transparency | 10.5 |
| Developer Ergonomics | 38.1 |
| Commercial Clarity | 31.6 |
| Access Clarity | 31.6 |

Regulatory layer — **Payments**: 40.6 (matched via tags).

## Agent readiness — 11.5 (agent-aware)

| Dimension | Value |
|---|---|
| Spec Presence | no |
| Agentic Access | no |
| Reversibility Documented | no |
| MCP Server | no |
| Auth Clarity | yes |
| Idempotency | no |
| Error Semantics | no |
| OpenAPI Examples | no |
| Rate Limit Signal | documented |
| Event Surface Described | no |
| Agent Skills | no |
| Well Known Catalog | no |
| Consent Identity | no |
| Agent Card | no |
| Dry Run Mode | no |

## Access

Unknown — onboarding: unknown, pricing: unknown, trial: no (confidence: low).

## APIs (5)

- **Wave Checkout API** — Hosted payment session API for accepting one-off payments from Wave wallet users. Create a checkout session, redirect the customer to the returned wave_launch_url, then receive ...
- **Wave Payout API** — Programmatic disbursement API for sending money from a business wallet to individual Wave wallets, identified by E.164 mobile number. Supports single payouts, payout batches (su...
- **Wave Balance & Reconciliation API** — Read-side API for inspecting a business wallet's current balance and enumerating its transactions for accounting and reconciliation. GET /v1/balance returns the live wallet bala...
- **Wave Aggregated Merchants API** — Sub-merchant management API for aggregators, payment service providers, and platforms that accept Wave payments on behalf of many downstream businesses. Full CRUD over aggregate...
- **Wave Webhooks** — Outbound event delivery channel for asynchronously notifying merchant systems when state changes on the Wave platform. Events include checkout.session.completed, checkout.sessio...

## Security (2)

- **Wave Mobile Money Domain Security** — TLSv1.3 · HSTS · DMARC
- **Wave Mobile Money Vulnerability Disclosure** — security.txt · contact published

## Tags

Mobile Money, Payments, Fintech, Financial Inclusion, Africa, West Africa, Senegal, Cote d'Ivoire, Uganda, Mali, Burkina Faso, Wallets, Disbursements, Checkout, Payouts, Money Transfer

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Profiled by [API Evangelist](https://apievangelist.com) and published on [APIs.io](https://apis.io/providers/wave-mobile-money/). Scores are computed from the provider's own public artifacts under a published rubric.