Nigerian fintech, Kippa, shuts down payments product, to lay off workers 

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. 

Announcing the withdrawal of the product from the market via a statement on Wednesday, Ekezie said: 

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.