The last decade has seen the speedy rise of FinTechs in various fields — savings, investments, online wallets, cryptocurrency, payments, insurance, etc. This innovation trend has also influenced how people live their daily lives. With the existence of new ways to send and receive money, fintech startups also created solutions that helped their customers make other forms of payments like utilities, taxes, bills, etc.

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As a result, buying scratch cards and queuing to pay your electricity bill is fast becoming a relic of the past. With FinTech, people can make these payments via an app, USSD or from an agent at any time of the day, anywhere.

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Today, it has become the bare minimum for most FinTech solutions to offer bill payment services (airtime/data, electricity, cable TV) to their customers. There are 11 electricity distribution companies, 4 major telcos and 3 main cable TV subscriptions in the country, and connecting to them, one after the other, is a hassle that most people do not have the luxury for.

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We built Bloc Bills Payment to solve this.

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Meet Bloc Bills Payment

Bills Payment refers to all forms of utility payments online. This includes, but is not limited to, electricity, airtime, data, cable TV subscriptions, taxes, and government levies. Bloc Bills Payment is an easy-to-integrate API product that helps software developers embed online bills payment natively into their products.

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With our Bills Payment API, you get instant access to 9 out of 11 Discos in Nigeria, MTN, 9Mobile, Airtel, GLO, StarTimes, DSTV, and GOTV. When live, your customers can buy credits or subscription units on your platform via our API within minutes.

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Bloc handles all the complexities and background relationships with the service providers.

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Several companies currently use Bills Payment including Eaziremit, a nationwide network of agents using our Bills Payment to power their agent banking services, and startups like Nomba (formerly Kudi).

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What services can you offer with Bloc Bills Payment?

There are three main services on Bloc Bills Payment — electricity bills, airtime/data, and cable TV subscriptions.

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For electricity, we support Eko Disco, Jos Disco, Kano Disco, Abuja Disco, Kaduna Disco, Enugu Disco, Ikeja Disco, Ibadan Disco, and Aba Disco. We do not currently offer Yola Disco & Benin Disco at the moment.

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For airtime/data, we support all major telcos — MTN, Airtel, GLO and 9Mobile. For cable TV subscriptions, we support StarTimes, DSTV, and GOTV.

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Why choose Bloc Bills Payment?

We recognize that there are many alternatives to Bloc in the market. However, here are some reasons why you should consider pitching your tent with us:

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• It costs you zero to use Bloc Bills Payment: We don’t charge you any fees for integration or go-live. We have committed to building a great developer experience so that you can go live as quickly as possible with no hassle. To start, visit our website and complete your account creation. You can also view our API documentation here.
• We pay you a commission for every successful transaction: When your customer successfully pays their bill via our API on your platform, we pay you a commission. This commission varies depending on the product.
  We settle this payment in your organization account with us, and you can withdraw it whenever you want. To understand how we payout commissions, download our pricing document here.

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• Ease of integration: Our APIs are easy to understand and integrate. They work well with third-party service providers and our API docs help you every step of the way. We also provide customer support to developers in cases where they hit a wall or have a problem.
• We have direct integrations with some of our service providers: Our suite of licenses and compliance certifications gives us leverage to complete direct integrations with some of these service providers. This year, we’ve completed direct integrations with MTN & Airtel; we also have integrations with some of the Discos.
  This allows us to pay even higher commission percentages to businesses while keeping costs low.
• You can charge an extra processing fee: You can manually add an extra processing fee when your customer makes a bill payment. You have full autonomy on how much you want to add as a charge to your customer.
  The best part is that it doesn’t affect the commission we pay you, and the extra fee is 100% yours. We don’t share your extra revenue with you.

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How To Get Started

Here are our API docs again, but if you have any questions or you’d love someone from the team to walk you through setting up your account or integration, please reach out to us at help@blochq.io. We’ll be happy to help.

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If there’s a service you’d love us to offer that we don’t currently support, please share your feedback via the email above.

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