What's New?

🔍 Identity Upgrades

Okra Identity helps you onboard users in seconds. It allows you to verify identities through accessing financial information and retrieve a full KYC profile for an individual or corporate entity (including directors) across all banks in Nigeria.

1. You can now do a BVN Check / Retrieval either via our widget or directly via API.
2. If you don't have your customer's BVN but you still have their account information via proper GDPR / NDPR guidelines, we now allow you to verify a customer's identity using only their account number.
3. For corporate accounts, you can verify a customer via RC numbers and TIN numbers with our RC/TIN Verification service.
4. You can also do a NIN Check / Retrieval either via our Widget or directly via our API. You can use the resulting NIN to obtain the KYC profile of your customer and verify them.

Check out our sample identity response for a data reference.  This is ideal for fraud reduction, onboarding users, and more.

💵 Payment management on the dash

We now have an easy way for you to manage your payment details. This new feature means you don’t have to worry about keeping track of what, how, and when your customers make payments. Here are some essential actions you'll be able to carry out on the dash:

• View your received payments, transaction values, the number of customers linked to you, and the wallet balance available to process a payout. All these are available on the Overall Stats page, where you can also cash out directly.
• Payment Apps shows you the apps created for payments, helps you filter down information for payments only, shows the values of each link, and allows you to create links as needed.
• On the Payment History page, you can view records such as, the most recent payment, which is updated in real-time, who made the payment, the recipient bank, the amount paid, the sender and receiver’s account, additional descriptions and payment schedule information (confirming whether it's a one time or recurring payment).
• Payouts show you your total wallet value, your customer's existing bank account(s), cashout methods available to you, and enable you to activate immediate payments.
• Initiate Payments directly from the dashboard for any customer account that has an open payment authorization.
• Disputes is still in beta. We’ll let you know when this is ready!

🏦 Financial Institutions:

We are constantly optimizing connections with financial institutions behind the scenes for scale, speed and stability.  Here are some updates from the past month:

1. Providus web - payments and data
2. Titan Trust mobile - payments and data
3. Polaris speed optimizations
4. FCMB Corp - Mobile
5. Paga
6. Paystack

To ensure accessibility and coverage across all institutions that users manage their finances with, we are expanding into non-traditional institutions such as micro-finance banks, digital wallets and more.  Paystack and Paga are the first for us in this category and we plan to add  1-2 more every week.  If you have any specific requests for integrations, please contact me.

👀 ICYMI:

Onboard your customers faster and cut down on customer churn with Okra Identity. It powers KYC integrations that verify customers within seconds. Learn how to build a KYC feature in your app with Okra.

A quick guide on integrating Okra's widget. This gives you access to the financial data of your customers in minutes!  We walk through how to get started with no-code.

Webhooks serve as doormen to API calls. They provide all you need to know about a request by an API in real-time. More details are in this guide.

Microlending is the easiest way to obtain small-scale loans. We walk through how to easily and affordably integrate with Okra to provide value to your users.

👫 We are hiring!

Know somebody that could be interested in joining our team?

Current openings include: Product Operations Associate, Sr. DevOps Engineer, Sr. Software Engineer (Banks), Sr. Frontend Engineer, Sr. Software Engineer (Core Services) or tell us your dream job!. Apply to all of our job posts on our site.

🚀 What's Next?

Last month, we teased one of our biggest announcements to date.  It turns out it's bigger than we thought and can't fit in this update so we'll be doing 2 this month.  Keep an eye on your inbox over the next couple of weeks for an announcement of Okra Widget 3.0!  Early tests show over a 10x performance improvement in key areas.  Here's a quick preview:

Join our community on slack if you have any questions or feature requests!

the Okra team,