What's new?

Expanded Identity Coverage

With Okra Identity, you can validate an end user's identity in real-time and avoid lengthy, manual KYC processes. Even more exciting, we now support 230+ institutions for identity verification (via BVN, NUBAN, Bank Sort code, or our Bank IDs and slugs) to ensure that we are always providing accurate and verified information!

ISO Certification

Okra is officially ISO certified! 🎉 We are committed to improving the experiences of businesses that use Okra and their customers and have earned the following certifications:

• ISO 22301 certification
• ISO 20000-1 certification
• ISO 27001 certification

These certifications show that we have established effective systems that mitigate business continuity risks and safeguard all proprietary and user data. Huge thanks to our certification partners 1905 Technologies and Panoramic Synergy for ensuring a smooth process!

Bulk Payment Initiations

You can now process bulk payments more efficiently via a POST request to this API endpoint: https://api.okra.ng/v2/bulkfiles/initiate. You can pass in bulk payment initiations by simply uploading a CSV file, with columns representing each field of a payment initiation (account_to_debit, account_to_credit, amount, currency, etc.). After all the payment initiations are processed, you will receive a message with a report detailing the response for each initiation. Find further documentation here.

Debit Later Authorization

Okra's debitLater feature allows you to save a customer's details without an initial payment. This feature is helpful if you want to onboard customers now, set them up for payments, and charge them in the future through the API. We made some updates this month to make this feature widely available across many banks.

Okra Status Page

To show the real-time status of all Okra systems, we launched status.okra.ng. You can view availability, performance, and historical uptime over the last 90 days. 📊

Failed Webhook Notifier

A webhook is a user-defined HTTP callback that is triggered when a particular event occurs on your Okra integration. For example, we send a balance.success event to your server as soon as a balance is retrieved. We implemented a failed webhook notifier to improve system notifications that send you an email when Okra cannot successfully deliver events (for example, if your server is offline or down).

🏦 Financial Institutions:

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

• FCMB
• Access Bank (Mobile)
• UBA

👀 ICYMI:

• Returning user experience (RUX) on the new Okra widget makes it faster for customers who have used Okra in the past to share their financial information with new businesses.
• Adesola Sanusi joined Okra from Google earlier this year as a product manager to lead one of our ambitious projects, citing culture and vision as the main factors. Read more about the thrilling story here.
• Our co-founder and COO, David Peterside, was featured in the Open Banking Report 2021 by The Paypers—a leading publishing house on global payments - to discuss the role of Open Finance in scaling operations for banks and fintechs in Africa. Read more from this knowledge-packed interview here.
• Complete View allows your customer to complete a debit authorization on all bank accounts, allowing authorized and customer consented access to all available banks, helping you make better business decisions!

👫 We are hiring!

Know somebody that could be interested in joining our team?

Current openings include: Customer Engineer (Technical), Data Analyst, Data Scientist (Machine Learning Engineer), Engineering Manager - Core Services, Platform Engineer, Sr. DevOps Engineer, Sr. Frontend Engineer, and more!

Apply to all of our job posts on our site.

🚀 What's Next?

With the end of the year fast approaching, we are excited to announce that we will be launching a revamped version of the Okra dashboard soon. Get excited about the MAJOR upgrades, and make sure to subscribe to the Okra Blog, so you do not miss anything!

The Okra Team.