Breaking: Kippa set to downsize workforce and cease offline payments product

Johnstone Kpilaakaa -

Effective this December, Nigerian fintech startup, Kippa has announced that it will lay off an undisclosed number of its workforce following the planned shutdown of its offline payments product: KippaPay. Per LinkedIn data, Kippa has about 75 employees.

“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,”  Kennedy Ekezie, co-founder and CEO of Kippa said in a statement seen by Bendada.com.

KippaPay will cease to exist on November 15. Ekezie said that the fintech “will provide support for our merchants and partners helping them transition off the product and resolve any pending settlements”. According to the CEO, KippaPay is being discontinued due to “profitable product portfolio consolidation”.

Ekezie argues that the closure is not due to dominance of competitors like Opay and Moniepoint

With the shutdown of its POS/agency banking offering, Kippa will be left with its bookkeeping and business registration offerings.

Although it started as a bookkeeping platform, the startup launched KippaPay in April 2023, as a payment solution enabling users to send and receive payments from customers and perform extended payment transactions automatically.

“KippaPay will also enable us to have a deeper understanding of our customers through transactional data, so that we can offer more tailored and bespoke products over time, unlocking deeper value within the Kippa ecosystem alongside our existing solutions,” Ekezie said at the launch.

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.

Since its launch, Kippa has raised about $11.6 million across two disclosed rounds, according to BD Funding Tracker.

This is a developing story and we will provide more updates when we get them.