Kippa a Fintech company 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.
Aside from the product’s discontinuance, employees of the company responsible for its production will also leave. The KippaPay team’s main members will depart by December of this year, the company said, without disclosing the exact amount of employment losses.
Kennedy Ekezie, the CEO and creator of Kippa, said that considering the amazing work the team had done, the company had to make a difficult decision to lay people off. He also made a suggestion that concerns about profitability led to the decision to discontinue the product.
The product’s removal from the market was announced by Ekezie in a statement on Wednesday (Oct. 18, 2023).
“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.”
Kippa, a platform for payments and financial management for small enterprises in Nigeria, was established in June 2021 and received $3.2 million in pre-seed funding in November of the same year.
The fintech firm raised a total of $11.6 million in funding, including an additional $8.4 million in a September 2022 funding round.
The firm designed the app to help small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) in Africa send and receive money from within the Kippa app, the company introduced KippaPay in April 2022.
As with OPay and Moniepoint, two of the biggest names in agency banking, Kippa received a Payment Solutions Services License to Operate as a Super-Agent from the Central Bank of Nigeria five months after KippaPay launched.
This license enabled the Nigerian fintech startup to provide POS terminals to over 500,000 merchants throughout the 774 local governments of the nation. These merchants could then function as agents and provide financial services to their clients, including cash withdrawals and deposits, bank account opening, bill payment, and utility payments.
