Fintech company, Kippa, is shutting down its offline payment product, KippaPay, a payment solution allowing users to make and receive payments from clients and undertake extended payment transactions.
The discontinuance of this product will also lead to the departure of staff in the firm in charge of the product. The firm did not specify the number of its people to be laid off, but it did announce that the core of the KippaPay team will depart by this December.
Kippa founder and CEO, Kennedy Ekezie, characterized the layoff as a painful choice for the firm going by the amazing effort the team had put in. He also implied that the decision to shut down the product was out of profitability concern.
The announcement
Announcing the withdrawal of the medication from the market via a statement on Wednesday, Ekezie said:
“Today, we announce that we’re pulling back our offline payments product: KippaPay from the market. Over the last 18 months, we established and extended this arm of our product portfolio to help retailers with offline payments and agency banking using our POS terminals.
“This corporate choice is connected to lucrative product portfolio consolidation. This decision sadly implies that the core of our staff supporting the KippaPay product will be departing us in December 2023. This has been a callous choice for us, but we are immensely pleased with the job this team has done and the effect KippaPay has had on our merchants.
“Starting November 15th, our KippaPay product will no longer be accessible for usage by retailers. In the weeks preceding this, we will offer assistance for our merchants and partners helping them move off the product and address any outstanding settlements.”
What you should know
Kippa, the financial management and payments platform for Nigerian small companies was created in June 2021 and the firm got $3.2 million in pre-seed investment in November of the same year.
In September 2022, the financial business secured another $8.4 million in a fresh investment round, increasing its total raise to $11.6 million.
The firm introduced KippaPay, a digital payments service developed to enable small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Africa to send and receive payments from inside the Kippa app in April 2022.
Five months following the introduction of KippaPay, the Central Bank of Nigeria gave Kippa a Payment Solutions Services Licence to Operate as a Super-Agent, exactly like prominent agency banking firms OPay and Moniepoint.
This licence allowed the Nigerian fintech startup to issue POS terminals to its over 500,000 merchants across the country’s 774 local governments, enabling them to act as agents and offer financial services such as cash withdrawals and deposits, bank account opening, bills and utility payments to their customers.
