Flick wants Africans to make easier and faster payments from a single platform

So this is how Flick works. If you have multiple bank accounts, Flick is a platform where you can control and monitor all the accounts. But it’s not just bank accounts. It’s also financial accounts with fintech startups.

Just barely a year since Ruth Olojede and Dipo Gbadebo founded it, the young startup was part of the inaugural ARM Labs Lagos Techstars Accelerator Program, which had its demo day just last week.

“Flick is building PayPal for Africa, enabling users to connect multiple bank accounts and pay directly from one source, making payments 7x faster.” communication material from Techstars describes the fintech.

“Two in five payments in Nigeria or in other parts of Africa either fail, are extremely delayed or result in disputes. That’s seven hundred million out of two billion dollars transacted daily,” the CEO Ruth Olojede said recently.

“And because of this, customers waste cumulatively three thousand hours daily resolving payment disputes. Either that is POS declines or bank transactions delay. Everybody has had frustrating payments. So we decided to solve that by creating Flick and just making it easier for people to pay,” she added.

And this waste emanating from failed transactions is not just happening in Nigeria alone or in loss of transactions. Businesses are losing customers because of this failure of quick and easy transactions.

“Businesses receiving payments across Africa lose customers amassing to thirty-two billion dollars in revenue loss annually.”

“That is why Nigerians like you and I have about three to eight different bank accounts, just to mitigate the risks of payment failures or delays. People just need a way to pay simpler and easier from these bank accounts,” she added.

So how will Flick, billed as the Paypal of Africa in PR materials, solve the problems of delayed transactions by bringing them together in a single location?

“Typically we like to say we’re building Paypal for Africa. We are building a solution to make payment simpler and faster for people. What we’ve done at Flick is to integrate the banks through open banking, and allow users to aggregate their accounts in order to speed up payments.

Meaning with Flick, customers can make payment within seven seconds when compared to the industry average of 23 seconds. And Flick payments are ninety-nine per cent reliable and much more convenient,” she said.

Because Flick aggregates customer accounts into a single channel, “business can get instant settlement into any bank account” through the platform.

“The great part is, it’s not just payments. Because Flick is data-driven, customers can from one single platform see all their financial data, their credit history, monitor their spending patterns, revenues made and even access quicker credit through our partner banks and fintech,” Olojede added.

This model makes it so that Flick would have to partner with multiple financial institutions to deliver its solution to customers. Sealing deals with these partner institutions has been a hassle.

“Our solution thrives on the number of partnerships that we can get together because basically what we are doing, we are aggregating the entire fragmented system and bringing it together in one place right. Getting into that ecosystem, networking, getting people to close this partnership has been an experience,” she said.

But Flick is not allowing the demands of this type of business model to deter it from moving forward. Olojede said that the company has big plans to expand into other countries in the next five years.

“We see Flick as being used by over five million users as a payment platform. We see ourselves extending beyond Nigeria, to like nine other countries,” she said.