Bloc, Nigeria’s Fintech Buys Payments Company, Orchestrate

A Nigerian business called Bloc, which offers full-service FinTech and banking as a service infrastructure, has acquired Getwallets, a wallets-as-a-service provider that has just changed its name to Orchestrate, a payments orchestration company.

Bloc will be able to concentrate on its main product strategy of providing seamless BaaS & banking services thanks to the strategic purchase, while Orchestrate will lead its FinTech infrastructure with its unique payments orchestration API.

Commenting on the acquisition, Edmund Olotu, founder of Bloc, said: “We are proud of our input in helping shape the African fintech space and excited to welcome the Orchestrate team into the Bloc family. Part of our vision has always been to empower businesses of all sizes to offer seamless payment solutions to their customers, which is essential not just to the experience of the end user but also to the sector’s growth. Jerry and his team have built an incredible platform that is a great fit with what we were looking to add to our suite of services so it made sense to acquire their proven expertise rather than building our own platform from scratch. This is an exciting evolution for both businesses as we look to grow and build even more solutions that ultimately supports the growth of African tech businesses in the coming years.’’

Getwallets was fully acquired by Bloc in a cash and stock transaction, however Jerry Enebeli, the company’s CEO and founder, will continue to run Getwallets as a separate business.

With its PSSP & Microfinance banking licenses from the CBN, Bloc specializes in offering exclusive and aggregated APIs that let companies deliver banking and financial services to their clients while also taking care of the majority of the regulatory and compliance needs on their behalf.

Bloc has changed from providing utility payment solutions to its present incarnation as a full-service FaaS infrastructure provider since 2021. Through its bill payments API alone, Bloc processed more than $30M in the previous calendar year. The business also just released its SuperAgency platform, which enables authorized businesses to provide agency banking services.

Jerry Enebeli and Yewande Odumosu launched Getwallets in 2021 to provide an integrated payment and wallet architecture that would give payment providers a more uniform structure for their clients. As a result of its change in direction to become a more comprehensive payments infrastructure provider, it can now offer businesses instant access to numerous payment providers and methods globally through a single integration as Orchestrate [currently available in Nigeria, Ghana, Egypt, South Africa, and the USA, with plans to soon expand support to additional foreign payment providers and currencies]. With the addition of Orchestrate to its portfolio of FinTech-as-a-Service APIs, Bloc is better able to provide FinTech infrastructure including online payments, subscription management, BNPL payment infrastructure, virtual wallets, bill payments, invoicing, etc.

The CEO and creator of Orchestrate, Jerry Enebeli, continued, “We are happy to contribute our technology and expertise to the already outstanding Bloc team. It was obvious that our objectives for business expansion were compatible, and we could both gain by pooling our skills, knowledge, and resources to build a special foundation for African fintech. We look forward to cooperating to fill the gaps in cross-platform payments that are now fragmented and enabling many more firms to expand their markets, whether in Africa or elsewhere in the world.

According to recent study, almost $3 billion, or two-thirds of all the capital received by startups throughout the continent last year, came from fintechs in Africa. Additionally, this was three times as much as what was raised in 2019 and more than double the $1.35 billion in investments that were raised in 2020. Bloc and Orchestrate intend to streamline the FinTech infrastructure for these companies so that their clients can receive faster, more seamless service, ultimately enabling ecosystem growth.