OnePipe has raised $950k in a pre-seed round. Now, let's go live faster.
We've all seen the very insightful article and talk by Angela Strange.
The world needs a new type of financial services ecosystem.
One where everyone has a role to play, and everyone has some value to capture.
Financial services. The remix.
All of us on the OnePipe team are firm believers in the open banking movement and what we believe it can do for financial services adoption in the world. While we are actively particpating with the Open Banking Nigeria group to bring awareness and drive policy around it, we have created a gateway that pools APIs from multiple sources together under a unified specification that can very easily be refined to fit the final standards once the policies become a thing.
We believe, that demonstrating to banks (and other FIs) the commercial viability of opening up APIs to businesses will help to further accelerate interest and a willingness to participate.
We've been on this journey for a little over two years and gotten the support and partnership of banks and businesses like Polaris Bank, SunTrust Bank, Fidelity Bank, Providus Bank, Migo, Flutterwave, Paystack, our friends at Quickteller, etc to name a few. With about 7 other banks coming onboard soon...
We've now been able to enlist the support of several institutional investors like Techstars, Atlantica Ventures, Future Perfect Ventures, Raba Capital, P1 Ventures, Ingressive Capital, Sherpa.Africa, Zedcrest Capital, DFS Lab and a bunch of really helpful angels including, Idris Ayo Bello, Jim Chu, Haresh Aswani, Vishal Agarwal, Folabi Esan, Chris Adelsbach (who also backed Kuda early on) and several more. Also on our advisory council, we can now tap from the (grey haired, haha!) experience of folks like Aniko Szigetvari, Charles Ifedi, IK Kanu, Jenny Fielding and Raj Kulasingam. With this shot in the arm, we are now prepped to chase down some of the opportunities that we feel would have been further along in our jouney. The vote of confidence inspires us and now we want to double down.
We've mocked up some use cases that can be easily achieved with financial services APIs enabled through OnePipe.
Imagine this...
Every business being able to embed financial services deep within their workflows and touchpoints by leveraging banking as a service APIs from partner banks who are open to growth through partnership with businesses that can help them distribute banking services to the last mile...
Also imagine this...
Banks can now offer to businesses a set of unique payment solutions, such that businesses that need to process payments from bank accounts and other methods, can connect to a single source that consolidates APIs from an array of banks and payment providers under a common standard without worrying about multiple integrations or long negotiation times...
Even imagine this...
That the primarily underbanked population of Nigeria are provided with banking services that makes it easier for them to generate a digital trail that empowers lenders like Migo to provide them with credit, which in turn generates an even broader digital trail that fuels even more credit. Mhen... A lot can happen when everyone opens up!
Collaboration is how we can expand this financial services market even further. Collaboration is how we all win.
We have now signed up several businesses including some of the bigger manufactuers, retail networks, agent networks and cooperative networks who are ready to go on this journey with the banks who have opened up to them through OnePipe. We indeed can make a dent in the world.
Everyday, all of these possibilities and the super committed team (I can't thank you peepu enough!!!!) grinding away at that our Ikeja office makes me both optimistic and afraid at the same time.
Please explore what is possible.
Ahead! Ahead!!