Bank transfers are a big part of modern financial technology as we know it today. Everyday, billions of bank transfers are being made to bank accounts, locally and internationally. Alongside account creation, bank transfers are the second most popular service offered by financial institutions.
Customers today think of bank transfers as send money → process transfer → deliver to recipient, and they rightly should. In spite of the bulk of activities that happens in the background for one bank transfer, it shouldn’t matter to the end customer as long as the money is rightly delivered on time.
For example, a business may want disburse loans to multiple customers at once; a FinTech product wants to be able to debit transaction fees from their customer’s wallet; a business wants their customers to transfer money out of their virtual account; an HRMS wants to embed salary payouts into their product, and so much more. Once you start distributing financial services to other customers, you start to think of how to make it easy for them to experience seamless transfers and how Bloc helps you to do that.
As a result, we have built our Transfers product to be wildly simple, fast and seamless. We have invested time and effort in making sure that we are closest to the source. We want to build the most reliable Transfers/Payout solution for businesses and their customers.
Reintroducing Bloc Transfers
More than 60% of businesses on Bloc use our Transfers to send money out to any bank account in Nigeria. With Bloc, businesses can send money out of their own account, or they can embed the product in their app and use it to offer bank transfer services to their own customers. Since leaving beta in March 2023, our transfer-out has a 98% success rate.
Here are a few things to expect when you use Bloc Transfers:
Faster settlements
Sending money with Bloc is processed almost instantly, and a “Successful” status on your Dashboard means that your money has been confirmed and received by the recipient’s bank. Depending on the receiving bank, this could take between 30 seconds to 5 minutes, or more in rarer cases.
Instant reversal for failed transfers
A failed transfer means that we were unable to send the money to the receiving bank. This may be due to server downtime reasons or being able to get response from the receiving bank. When this happens, we reverse the money (and the accompanying fees) instantly, and you’ll see it as a CR transaction.
View reason for failed transfers
We included a failure reason field for when transfers fail. This gives businesses the details they need to inform their customers with. You can also get/copy the NIP transaction reference of every transfer done with Bloc. In cases of delayed settlement by the receiving bank, this reference can be used to lodge a complaint and promptly resolve the issue.
Bulk Transfers
We recently deployed bulk transfers on the Bloc API and Dashboard.
With Bloc, you can process instant bank transfers to up to 1000 bank accounts at once using our bulk transfers feature. All you have to do is upload a CSV using our template, and that is done.
To learn more about how this works, read this article.
Pricing
For transfers lower than NGN 5,000, we charge NGN 10 per transaction. Between NGN 5,001 and NGN 50,000, we charge NGN 20 per transaction. For all transfers above NGN 50,000, we charge NGN 45 per transaction.
Commonly asked questions
What happens when my transfer is pending?
If you see the “Pending” status on your Dashboard, it means we have not been able to communicate with the receiving bank. Usually, we keep trying a few more times until we are successful, but if we aren’t, the status changes to “failed”, and the money is reversed to the sending account.
Are the fees negotiable?
No, they are not. Our transfers-out fees are flat rate fees applicable to all transactions performed on our infrastructure.
Who is your service provider?
We 100% own our infrastructure. We are connected directly to NIBSS and can independently process instant bank transfers without relying on a third-party service provider.
How reliable is your service?
Very reliable! We have recorded a 98% success rate since coming out of private beta. In the rare case that your transfers do not go through, be rest assured that we’ll resolve it with you.
My Dashboard says successful, but the recipient didn’t get it
This usually happens when the receiving bank is experiencing some delay with settling the amount in the recipient’s account. When this happens, please contact the receiving bank with proof of the transaction. You can find this by viewing the transaction details of that particular transfer.