Kora is a pan-African payment infrastructure company headquartered in

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tot ...

with offices in

Nigeria Nigeria ( ), , ig, Naìjíríyà, yo, Nàìjíríà, pcm, Naijá , ff, Naajeeriya, kcg, Naijeriya officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a country in West Africa. It is situated between the Sahel to the north and the Gulf o ...

and the United Kingdom. The fintech company enables local and global businesses to accept payins, make payouts, and get settled across popular payment channels across Africa.

History

Dickson Nsofor founded Kora in 2017. Later on, Gideon Orovwiroro, Bryan Uyanwune and Ayodeji Osisami joined him as the first employees. At the time, the company focused on building financial tools for NGOs to disburse funds utilizing the

blockchain A blockchain is a type of distributed ledger technology (DLT) that consists of growing lists of records, called ''blocks'', that are securely linked together using cryptography. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, a ...

technology. The idea for the company came from Dickson Nsofor, who was at the time working for a fintech in London, HumanIQ, providing a solution to the problem of 60% of the world's population lacking full access to financial services.

Growth

Kora started as a remittance business. In 2019, the decision was made to pivot, making Kora into a B2B business that now offers the services it does. That same year, the company attended Techstars Toronto. In 2022, the company received a commercial PSSP license from the Central Bank of Nigeria. Later in the year, Kora expanded to the United Kingdom by partnering with the municipal government in Birmingham to open its first fully operational UK office. At the

2022 Commonwealth Games The 2022 Commonwealth Games, officially known as the XXII Commonwealth Games and commonly known as Birmingham 2022, was an international multi-sport event for members of the Commonwealth of Nations that took place in Birmingham, England bet ...

opening ceremony, Kora was announced as a new Commonwealth-sourced foreign direct investments (FDI) project for the West Midlands. In July, the company was accused of fraud in Kenya, but the charges were dropped a few months later after investigations revealed no wrongdoing on the part of the company. Both Kenya Asset Recovery Agency and the Kenyan Department for Criminal Investigation found no evidence of fraud in the company's operations. In one court document drawn and filed on the 19th of October 2022 by state counsel Stephen Githinji on behalf of the ARA director, the agency said that it had withdrawn its entire lawsuit.

Services

Kora offers a payment application programming interface (

API An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software Interface (computing), interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standa ...

) to companies that give them access to a suit of products and services including, Checkout, Payout, Payment Links, Virtual Bank Account, Dynamic Virtual Bank Account, Fixed Bank Account, mobile money payments acquiring, card acquiring, bulk payout, etc.

References

Nigerian companies established in 2017 Headquarters in Canada Payment service providers {{Africa-bank-stub