I am excited to introduce Duplo, a fintech startup backed by Ycombinator as part of the winter 2022 batch that is modernizing business-to-business payments for enterprises.   

While growing up, I saw my grandmother, a major Nestle distributor in South-Western Nigeria, struggle with her payments from small retailers. Undoubtedly, she had a complex business model which was the case for many B2B businesses. 

The entire payment system was plugged with:

• Numerous reconciliation issues
• Fraudulent activities by retailers and sales agents
• Cash payment dependence 
• Payment on credit

It’s the year 2022 and these problems still persist in Nigeria and the entire African continent; B2B businesses are still dealing with common issues like; the dominance of manual invoices, payment taking place via bank check, and locked-up working capital cycle. 

Paper-based and offline payment remains at the forefront of B2B business. Experts see this as one of the biggest predicaments that on one hand, is hampering continental economic growth and on the other hand, making B2B business models complex with longer payment cycles. 

In this era of technological advancement in the fintech space, businesses deserve better channels for their payment. 

The unfortunate truth about B2B is buying cycles are long. Hence, embracing digital channels will turn business payments from a throbbing pain to a revenue generator. Some other mentionable benefits are 

• Improved cash forecasting
• Faster transaction settlement
• Seamless reconciliation
• Automatic invoicing
• Straight-through processing to A/P or A/R and general ledger 

Fortunately, many businesses have started to realize the benefits of digitized B2B payment solutions. However, there aren’t many trusted, client-friendly, and reliable solutions at the moment in Nigeria/Africa. 

This inspired us to develop a comprehensive payment solution that will turbocharge the growth of many businesses on the continent. As a business, you would want to automate your payment inflows/outflows, add payments functionalities into your products/services and reconcile at scale. 

This is where Duplo comes in!

Irrespective of your business domain i.e., distributors, B2B, wholesalers, retailers, or franchises Duplo can help you with; 

• Payment collection
• Automating mass payouts
• Getting paid upfront - while your business customers can pay in 30, 60, or 90 days
• Chain management

Key features and benefits of the Duplo platform include:

• Consumer-grade business payment experience: Duplo offers business buyers an enhanced business payment experience.
• Vendor payout control: Offers support for B2B marketplaces, services, and software companies to automatically onboard and payout vendors.
• Instant and automated financing: Offers buyers flexible terms, with instant payouts.
• Developer ready: Duplo offers robust APIs to bolster the payments toolkit with B2B-specific payment capabilities.
• Extensive reporting and analytics: Duplo has an interactive dashboard that displays all your business cash flows at a glance. With such analytics, you can make prudent financial decisions quickly. 
• Fraud & error protection: Duplo will reduce human errors during reconciliation and reporting. 

The global B2B payments market size was valued at $870.42 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach $1.91 trillion by 2028. It is expected that B2B payments in Africa will grow at that same rate. There is a huge opportunity to bring greater efficiency and add more value for businesses via this new and improved B2B payment solution. 

We are here to build more billion-dollar business success stories and hopefully, we will remain at the forefront of this for decades to come. 

Thank you to our earliest supporters. 

And if you think our mission matches perfectly with your business, we would love to hear from you. Feel free to reach out and we would be happy to help.