The introduction of the cashless policy in 2012 increased the popularity of several digitised payment methods, including but not limited to cards and bank transfers. This transition was powered mainly by a robust real-time payment processing infrastructure and the solid backing of the government.
A decade later, many businesses have now become receptive to digital payment methods. Bank transfers, for one, are still one of the most common ways to send money today. They have remained popular due to their ease of use, trustworthiness, ubiquity and cost-effectiveness.
With the advent of FinTech startups, sending and receiving payments via bank transfers into wallets have become the standard and are expected to be the bare minimum by the end customer. However, in good faith, government regulation has made this endeavour difficult for most startups.
Today, we are excited to make bank transfers (and more) available via our Bloc Accounts product to startups and companies in Nigeria.
What is Bloc Accounts?
Bloc Accounts is a product of our Banking as a Service infrastructure suite that allows you to issue bank account numbers to your end customers instantly. There are three types:
- Savings Accounts. Users can create NDIC-insured savings accounts for individuals who want to deposit money as is convenient for them.
- Current Accounts. Users can issue current accounts for individuals and businesses/companies who perform regular or frequent transactions.
- Virtual Accounts. You can issue dedicated virtual account numbers to your customers who want to make payments via bank transfer on your product/app.
Unlike commercial banks, FinTechs no longer need to acquire a banking license; with our API, it is simply plug-and-play. Bloc owns and manages all the heavy lifting of compliance and bank relationships.
But it doesn’t end there. We’ve built a solution that removes the pain of building features for funding wallets or transferring out to other bank accounts. We enhanced the user experience and made it delightful to operate in the following ways:
- A simple and powerful dashboard. Everything our users can do with an API, they can do with clicks on the dashboard. See transaction logs, create new bank accounts, see a list of accounts created, etc. — this allows businesses to manage their performance without needing to build a monitoring tool from scratch.
- Seamless transfers to other banks. While account numbers exist mainly to receive payment into a wallet or an account, Bloc users can integrate transfers and power near-instant payouts to any bank account in Nigeria from their product/app.
- Bulk disbursement. Alongside our Accounts API, you can manage bulk transfers and send money to multiple individuals/businesses simultaneously. Our users can also do this via an API call or clicks on the dashboard.
- Direct integration to other products like Bills Payment, Agency Banking, etc. Our Accounts is compatible with our Bills Payment API, allowing users to sell their customers airtime/data, electricity and cable TV subscriptions. With an API call or a few clicks on the dashboard, users can also set up a fully-compliant agency banking business powered by our Accounts API in less than half the time it usually takes.
- A large ecosystem play. With more BaaS products (Cards, POS issuance, Lending, etc.) becoming available in beta over the next few months, our Accounts API sets our users up nicely for smooth integration with these services. In no time, they can upgrade their offerings and manage it all from one place.
More importantly, why Bloc Accounts?
We are one option in a sea of alternatives. We recognise this, so we decided to make things even better for our users.
- Test our API even if you are not ready to go live yet. Our users range from very experienced startups to freelance developers. We understand this, and we make it possible for you to sign up and set up a Bloc account without needing to contact us or provide company documents. We only request these when you are ready to go live. This means that nothing prevents you from testing our API with your product and moving forward with your roadmap.
- Clear and affordable pricing. We’ve taken extra care to make our pricing affordable for businesses of any size. There are no hidden charges or fees when you use our Accounts product.
- Scale your product offering with ease. Are you thinking of selling airtime/data on your platform? Or do you want to issue cards sometime in the future? Build and quickly test your product roadmap with our suite of products at no cost — until you are ready to go live.
Bloc Accounts is now available.
Today’s Bloc Accounts API product launch begins a new journey for us. In the future, we will expand our capabilities to include foreign accounts and cross-border transfers while we continue to improve what you can do with our NGN Accounts.
You can get started with Bloc Accounts here, available only in Nigeria and visit our API documentation for more information on our full Banking as a Service suite.