Fintech company, Kippa, is shutting down its offline payment product, KippaPay, a payment solution enabling users to send and receive payments from customers and perform extended payment transactions.
The discontinuation of this product will also lead to the exit of workers in the company in charge of the product. The company did not disclose the number of its staff to be laid off, but it did state that the core of the KippaPay team would leave by this December.
Kippa founder and CEO, Kennedy Ekezie, described the layoff as a difficult decision for the company going by the incredible work the team had put in. He also hinted that the decision to shut down the product was out of profitability concern.
The announcement
Announcing the withdrawal of the product 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 past 18 months, we launched and grew this arm of our product suite to support merchants with offline payments and agency banking through our POS terminals.
“This company decision is related to profitable product portfolio consolidation. This decision unfortunately means that the core of our team supporting the KippaPay product will be leaving us in December 2023. This has been an incredibly difficult decision for us to make, but we are incredibly proud of the work this team has done, and the impact KippaPay has had on our merchants.
“Starting November 15th, our KippaPay product will no longer be available for use by merchants. In the weeks leading up to this, we will provide support for our merchants and partners helping them transition off the product and resolve any pending settlements.”
What you should know
Kippa, the financial management and payments platform for Nigerian small businesses was founded in June 2021 and the company secured $3.2 million in pre-seed funding in November of the same year.
In September 2022, the fintech startup raised another $8.4 million in a new financing round, bringing its total raise to $11.6 million.
The company launched KippaPay, its digital payments offering built to enable small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Africa to send and receive payments from within the Kippa app in April 2022.
Five months after the launch of KippaPay, the Central Bank of Nigeria issued Kippa a Payment Solutions Services Licence to Operate as a Super-Agent, just like leading agency banking players 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.