Kippa, the Nigerian fintech backed by investors like Saison Capital and Horizone, has transferred the operations of KippaPay, an agency banking product it shut down in October, to Bloc, a Nigerian fintech preparing to launch banking services. KippaPay has now been integrated into GPay, a payment subsidiary Bloc owns.
“You can think of it as a handshake agreement as [Kippa] still owns the product,” Kennedy Ekezie, the cofounder of Kippa, told TechCabal during a phone call.
“The deal with Bloc was closed weeks ago,” Ekezie said. “After speaking with several other companies, we chose to go with Bloc because they showed the most ability to provide immediate support for our merchants.”
Kippa shut down KippaPay after June’s Naira devaluation dramatically increased the cost of buying the POS terminals its banking agents use. In an intensely competitive market, those costs would have been impossible to recoup without raising the commission it charged its agents.
Bloc emailed existing users today, confirming that full service has been restored on KippaPay’s mobile app and Android terminal. It also shared instructions on resuming transactions on the agency banking platform.
Per the same email, service has not been fully restored to Linux terminals, which facilitate payment through the handheld POS device. A source close to Kippa told TechCabal that merchants had been directed to return their POS devices to Kippa. “Those who have not will be onboarded as GPay users,” they said.
A spokesperson for Bloc told TechCabal that they have officially resumed operations and migrated every agent signed up on KippaPay to the new GPay application. “Over the next few weeks, we’ll be working hard to seamlessly engage with the over 19,000 agents and get them settled in,” the spokesperson said.
Note: This article has been edited to include official comments from Bloc.
