Afrigather For Lanre*, a Lagos-based businessman, the previous month has been a nightmare. Unable to entry buyer knowledge, which he has painstakingly collected over the previous two years, he now manually tracks receivables and e-mail addresses of specific clients to whom he desires to ship low cost codes.
He is among the reportedly 500,000 business people who used Kippa, a Nigerian fintech app, for bookkeeping, invoicing and the sort of documentation each small enterprise proprietor wants. Since January 2024, the Kippa app has been inaccessible, leaving the enterprise house owners who had come to rely on it with out entry to essential knowledge like stock, transactions, debtors, earnings, bills, funds, and invoices.
“It had particulars of all my purchasers, my gross sales document, and every part else I wanted to evaluate my revenue and loss,” Lanre informed TechCabal.
The app has been on autopilot for a while, one particular person with information of the corporate’s enterprise informed TechCabal, claiming that the Kippa app will quickly be taken down from the Google Play Retailer and the Apple App Retailer, leaving enterprise house owners completely unable to entry their knowledge.
Kippa’s sudden inaccessible bookkeeping platform “is basically a breach of its obligations” to its clients, Akintunde Agunbiade, a lawyer at Aelex, a Lagos-based agency, informed TechCabal, citing Nigeria’s knowledge safety legal guidelines.
Launched in 2021, Kippa supplied small companies a free-to-use and simplified bookkeeping platform for all their knowledge wants. For a lot of, it was a sport changer and a departure from manually maintaining enterprise data. However three years after these customers had come to depend on the app, they face a actuality the place such vital knowledge is not accessible and so they wish to know in the event that they’ll get that knowledge again. Many others are pissed off on the firm’s poor communication.
On a Telegram channel operated by Kippa, greater than 2,000 customers say they’re nonetheless unable to entry their knowledge on the app. It’s been like this for a month, however all their messages are met with silence.
“Customers have been asking for entry to knowledge to allow them to transfer to a different platform or resume their earlier conventional manner of managing their books, however no response has been given,” one Kippa person informed TechCabal in an e-mail.
“I’ve been completely blind about my enterprise since Kippa shut down. I don’t know what’s going to occur to my knowledge, if I can get it again, or whether it is even safe,” one other Kippa person informed TechCabal.
At the start of the app blackout, Kennedy Ekezie, the corporate’s CEO, informed one buyer in a message seen by TechCabal that the issue was a “short-term AWS downtime” that may be resolved shortly. However the firm seems to have moved on from fintech and is planning to pivot to edtech, as TechCabal first reported.
The corporate has not publicly confirmed the pivot or knowledgeable customers about its resolution to maneuver on from fintech. The corporate’s CEO didn’t reply to an e-mail from TechCabal in search of feedback for this text.
It has been a yr of huge modifications for the Tiger-backed fintech, having shut down Kippa Pay, its company banking enterprise and Kippa Begin, its enterprise registration vertical. It has additionally considerably diminished its workforce and is placing all its focus on an AI-powered platform that allows customers to create on-line programs utilizing any file format and share them on their most popular messaging platforms.
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