Nigerian Fintech Startup Expands to the UK

Kora, a Nigerian based payment infrastructure firm that offers payment API for payment collections, disbursements has launched its first UK office.

Kora partnered with the Government of Birmingham to power this expansion via the West Midlands Growth Company, an organisation responsible for driving regional investment promotion and economic development for the West Midlands and the UK.

According to the Chief Operating Officer at Kora, Gideon Oroywiroro, the ambition for Kora since day one has been to make Africa open from a financial standpoint and this new office is an important step for the startup.

“We are excited to have a partner in the West Midlands Growth Company whose ambition is aligned with ours; to remove barriers for local and global commerce,” he said.

Located at the heart of the UK’s fastest-growing region in terms of technology, Birmingham was chosen as Kora’s first UK office because of its solid infrastructure and ease of access to talent.

With this partnership, the West Midlands Growth Company will support Kora’s ambition to provide the infrastructure that allows local African businesses to go global and global companies to go local in Africa.

Kora began operations in Nigeria in 2018 to help Africans in the diaspora make remittances to Africa. Since then, it has evolved into a payment infrastructure for Africa, allowing global companies to scale rapidly across Africa.

With a single integration, Kora powers businesses to accept payins, payouts and settle across popular payment channels.

Kora’s cross-border product is available for businesses across 25 African countries.

Earlier in 2022, Kora received its commercial PSSP license from the Central Bank of Nigeria, further empowering the company to drive its vision of creating open standards for payments across Africa.

Companies like GiG, Juice Africa, Dlocal and PayFuture already use Kora’s bouquet of products to power their African operations.