OnePipe

OnePipe is a Lagos, Nigeria-based financial infrastructure company that aggregates APIs from banks and fintech providers behind a single standardized interface. Its original positioning was an API gateway giving access to APIs from more than 20 banks and fintechs under a common standard, with capabilities spanning payment processing (cards, accounts and wallets), managed wallets and deposit holding, short-term loan origination and loan verification, bill payment and airtime purchase services, and KYC and validation functions such as BVN lookup and account or card ownership verification. Additional listed capabilities include account opening, credit scoring, statement extraction, payment confirmation, bill enquiries and insurance. The design principle is that a customer can offer the same service from multiple partners through one unified interface and switch partners without changing its integration.

According to founder and CEO Ope Adeoye, the company pivoted after finding that the core open banking gateway approach was not generating sufficient demand, moving instead into embedded finance and banking-as-a-service. In that model OnePipe runs API infrastructure on behalf of partner banks — six at the time of the 2021 report, deliberately weighted toward tier-two and tier-three institutions — and enables non-financial businesses to launch and cross-sell accounts, payments and credit to their own customers. The current product set includes regulatory-compliant NUBAN virtual accounts that clients can operate via API, credit facilities such as loans, inventory finance and buy-now-pay-later, and payment execution with settlement and reconciliation. Flagship solutions are branded PaywithTransfer (embedded payments including virtual accounts and cards), Pay4me (inventory finance, asset finance and short-term cash loans) and Benefits.

OnePipe offers both raw API integration and prebuilt products for companies without their own platform, including a no-code account-to-account payment flow in which the company generates a unique USSD code for a merchant to collect instalment and recurring bank-account payments with consent management and immediate settlement, and an inventory finance product through which distributors extend managed credit lines to their trade customers.

Founding story

Founded in 2018, with Ope Adeoye as founder and CEO; he describes himself as the company's "chief plumber."

Business model

OnePipe sells financial infrastructure to businesses, either as APIs for companies with their own platforms or as prebuilt products for those without. It pre-negotiates and pre-integrates access to bank and fintech APIs so that client businesses avoid separate commercial, technical and compliance integrations with each provider, and it operates API infrastructure on behalf of partner banks while helping them monetize it.

The company takes a percentage cut of transactions made on the accounts it enables and shares that with its partner banks. On loans offered through its APIs it takes at least 1% of the loan interest from lending partners, also sharing with the businesses and partner banks.

Traction

In the ten months after switching to the embedded finance model, OnePipe reported processing over 6.3 million transactions worth more than $46.3 million, across over 1 million individual accounts and 138+ businesses, as of November 2021. It reported six partner banks at that time and advertises access to APIs from 20+ banks and fintechs.

Latest developments

In March 2023 OnePipe was reported to have raised NGN 2.25bn ($4.8m) led by TLG Capital, its first debt partner, to fund inventory finance for small shops and to scale toward becoming a leading provider of financial services to Nigerian micro-enterprises.