Dear esteemed customers,

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My name is Edmund, CEO at Bloc, and I am excited to introduce you to Bloc — again! Three years ago, I had a vision of how businesses would run over the next decade, where founders and business operators like yourself would want more innovation in how they handle money.

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I remember the first meeting we had as Bloc leadership. “All companies will become FinTech companies” was how we described this vision. We chose and committed to building a company with the mission “to allow all types of companies access, build and deploy financial services.”

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What does this mean? A small business or large non-FinTech organisation deserves the same quality of financial technology innovation as tech companies who build custom applications with API.

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If an e-commerce company like Jumia can build a wallet to simplify how merchants and customers sell and buy their website, then a small pharmacy chain should be able to do it, too. If big multinationals can build legacy in-house products to manage bespoke/uncommon financial operations, then a supermarket should also be able to do it.

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There are just over 300 active FinTechs and 17 million active SMEs driving the Nigerian economy. These SMEs impact the daily lives of all Nigerians, and can contribute to the financial inclusion goal of the country. Bloc 2.0B goes beyond providing convenient banking and payment services and kickstarts a journey of enabling these SMEs to include the financially underserved in their audience/communities. 

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Introducing Bloc 2.0B

In the last 18 months, we’ve enabled FinTechs and technical teams to build and deploy banking and payment services. However, we excluded the primary drivers of any economy — SMEs, who are typically non-technical businesses — from accessing our broad banking and payment infrastructure.

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Today, I am proud to announce a new step in this direction. We call it Bloc 2.0B. With this, we solved the access problem for all types of businesses by fundamentally changing how banking and payments happen for all companies while enabling them to deploy bespoke financial services that guarantee business growth and sustainability. 

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We have taken our banking and payments infrastructure that has powered, and continues to power, hundreds of FinTech startups and built a bank with it.

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Fundamentally, helping businesses reliably send and receive money is what a bank does, and we do that well. We want African companies to participate effectively in global commerce by removing the frictions they face locally and globally with moving money. When we started building Bloc 2.0B, I told the team that we were building the bank we always needed, and I am proud to say that we pulled all the stops in building the bank of our dreams.

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Our banking services powered by our licensed subsidiaries and CBN-compliant partners provide business bank accounts, transfers and payment functionalities, allowing you and thousands of other businesses to securely send money locally, pay bills online, accept online payments, and manage your deposits in one Dashboard. But we didn’t stop there. 

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Why care about Bloc 2.0B?

Bloc 2.0B takes a deeper dive into the problems businesses face with money-in and money-out. We asked ourselves, “How can we further simplify access to more out-of-reach banking and payment functionalities for our customers?”

In addition to the standard local banking and payment services shared above, we’ve designed:

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• Unlimited sub-accounts and debit cards to manage your expenses and gain more oversight over your internal financial operations.
• POS Terminals for agency banking and in-person payments via card or bank transfer.
• Prebuilt templates and no-code tools that help businesses offer banking services (bank accounts and debit cards) to their own customers, staff, etc.
• USD bank accounts to help you accept payments from anywhere in the world.
• Global payouts to help you send money to over 50 currencies across the world.
• Developer features to allow technical teams to build custom applications with our arsenal of banking and payments products with the Bloc API.

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Security & Compliance

Being a bank means we are regulated by the Central Bank. Bloc 2.0B ticks off all the boxes when it comes to compliance and security. Our banking services are powered by two banking institutions, fully licensed and approved by the CBN. All of our bank accounts (local and global) are deposit-insured. Our online payment services are powered by our PSSP-licensed subsidiary, while our POS Terminals are powered by licensed PSP partners. And all of our services comply with the highest global security standards — PCI-DSS and ISO-27001.

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The future for us is limitless. As our customers grow, we will continue to scale the services that you enjoy on our platform. We believe businesses like yours should have access to much more — Capital (lending and investment), Treasury, Advisory Services, etc. 

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On top of that, technical teams now get the chance to build their products with the same proprietary infrastructure that powers their business banking. As we grow our features and products, they experience first-hand how it works and gain access to seamlessly embed them into their product if they choose to. 

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Finally, led by Oswald Osaretin Guobadia, we are assembling a stellar board of advisors and directors to lead several sub-committees. Directors like these impose fiscal responsibilities on financial institutions and companies like ours. This ensures that our quality of service is never compromised and that we place extra measures to protect our customer deposits outside the standard compliance, licensing and deposit insurance policies.

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We built Bloc to serve you.

Last but not least, we built the core values at Bloc into this service. Existing customers will attest to the fact that, as an infrastructure company, we obsess over transparency and communication. And we baked this into our processes for new customers joining us with Bloc 2.0B.

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Your money is important, and we don’t take your decision to grow it with us lightly. To provide the best service to you, we expanded our Support team and optimized our internal processes to make sure that you get the best service possible if you need to make enquiries or simply want to say hello.

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It’s an exciting time for us at Bloc. We can’t wait to learn how this improves banking and payments for you and your business and what more we can do for you. We’ll be going live in the next few days, if you’d like to be the first to know when we are live, please click here to sign up.

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We’re not just an infrastructure company anymore. Bloc is now a full-service business bank for all businesses, with no code tools for some and API infrastructure for others. We want to power your business and startup dreams end-to-end.

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If you have any questions about how this affects you or feedback, please email the Support team at help@blochq.io. We’ll make sure to respond within the day.

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Cheers to growing together.

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Edmund Olotu,
Founder & CEO.