Bloc acquires Orchestrate to offer Fintech Infrastructure Services

Bloc, Nigeria’s full-service provider of FinTech and Banking as a Service infrastructure, announces the acquisition of Getwallets, the wallet-as-a-service provider that has recently transformed into a payment orchestration company, Orchestrate.

The strategic acquisition will enable Bloc to focus its core product strategy on delivering seamless BaaS and banking services, while Orchestrate will lead its FinTech Infrastructure with its proprietary payment orchestration API.

Bloc’s 100% acquisition of Getwallets is a combined cash and stock agreement with the renewed newcomer to the Bloc family, which is still an independent entity still managed by CEO and founder Jerry Enebeli.

Bloc, with its CBN-issued PSSP and microfinance banking licenses, specializes in offering proprietary and aggregated APIs that allow businesses to offer banking and financial services to their customers, while handling most regulatory and compliance requirements on their behalf.

The stack of F / BaaS products and services allows companies to build seamless digital financial services into their platform. Since 2021, Bloc has moved from offering solutions for usage payments to its current iteration as a full-service provider of FaaS infrastructure.

Bloc has processed more than $ 30 million in the past year through its invoice payment API alone. The company also recently launched its SuperAgency tool that allows licensed companies to offer agency banking services.

Getwallets was founded in 2021 by Jerry Enebeli and Yewande Odumosu to offer an integrated payment and wallet framework that gives payment providers a more unified structure for their customers.

Its pivot to a broader payment infrastructure company means, like Orchestrate, that it can give companies instant access to multiple payment methods and suppliers globally through a single integration [currently available in Nigeria, Ghana, Egypt, South Africa & the USA, with plans to extend support to more foreign payment providers and currencies in the near future].

Bloc’s acquisition of Orchestrate increases the group’s capacity to offer FinTech infrastructure such as online payments, subscription management, BNPL payment infrastructure, virtual wallets, bill payments, invoicing, etc, in its FinTech-as-a-Service suite of APIs.

Commenting on the acquisition, Bloc founder Edmund Olotu said: “We are proud of our input in shaping the African fintech area and happy to welcome the Orchestrate team into the Bloc family.

Part of our vision has always been to give companies of all sizes the opportunity to offer seamless payment solutions to their customers, which is crucial not only for the experience of the end user, but also for the growth of the sector.

Jerry and his team have built an incredible platform that fits well with what we wanted to add to our services, so it made sense to acquire their documented expertise instead of building our own platform from scratch.

This is an exciting development for both companies as we want to grow and build even more solutions that will ultimately support the growth of African technology companies in the coming years. ”

Jerry Enebeli, founder and CEO of Orchestrate, added, “We are excited to bring our technology and knowledge to the already incredible Bloc team.

It was clear that our business growth goals were consistent and that we could benefit from combining our talents, resources and expertise to create a unique infrastructure that can drive African fintech.

We look forward to working together to close the fragmented gaps in cross-platform payments and enable many more companies to scale their markets, whether in Africa or globally. “

New research shows that fintech in Africa accounted for about $ 3 billion, or two-thirds of all funding obtained by startups across the continent last year.

This was also more than double the $ 1.35 billion in investments raised in 2020, and three times the amount raised in 2019.

Bloc and Orchestrate wants to simplify the FinTech infrastructure for these businesses to enable faster, seamless service to their customers and ultimately boost ecosystem growth.

Featured image: Orchestrate Team

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