Following the scheduled suspension of its offline payments platform, KippaPay, Nigerian fintech firm Kippa has stated that it will let go of an unspecified number of its employees as of this December. According to LinkedIn, Kippa employs roughly 75 people.
Kennedy Ekezie, co-founder and CEO of Kippa, said in a statement, “This has been an incredibly tough 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.” According to the CEO, KippaPay is being discontinued due to “profitable product portfolio consolidation”.
The last day of KippaPay will be November 15. According to Ekezie, the fintech “will provide support for our merchants and partners, helping them transition off the product and resolve any pending settlements”.
Kippa is a bookkeeping and asset management application for small and medium-sized enterprises in sub-Saharan Africa. Despite beginning with this solution, the business introduced KippaPay in April 2023, a payment solution that allowed users to send and receive payments from clients and carry out extended payment transactions automatically.
Over the course of two reported rounds since its start, Kippa has raised around $11.6 million. The firm claimed that as of September 2022, its annual transaction volume had surpassed $3 billion, which is ten times more than it had the year before.
At its launch, Ekezie said that KippaPay would allow the business to have a deeper understanding of its customers through transactional data so that it can offer more specialized and custom products over time, unlocking deeper value within the Kippa ecosystem alongside current solutions.
Similar to top agency banking players OPay and Moniepoint, the Central Bank of Nigeria granted Kippa a Payment Solutions Services Licence to Operate as a Super-Agent five months following the debut of KippaPay.
With this license, the Nigerian fintech startup was able to distribute POS terminals to over 500,000 merchants in the 774 local governments of the nation, empowering them to serve as agents for their customers and provide financial services like cash withdrawals and deposits, bank account opening, bill and utility payments, and more. Sadly, the business will close down 14 months after that.
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