Year In Review: 2022
We’re coming to a close for 2022! We have many memorable moments throughout the year. Read this quick recap of our year in our quest to connect a billion Africans to the global economy.
A look into Okra’s Journey this year
This year, we’ve taken new steps into building the next generation of tools for Open Finance innovation. The vision has grown stronger and the team and product have reached new heights. This year we reimagined ourselves, rewrote our future and expanded the team that’s telling our story.
Reimagining Okra - Brand Redesign
This year, we made a great leap forward in our visual identity with the rebrand at the beginning of the year. A clear demonstration of clean product design with a memorable aesthetic. This set the stage for a generation of Okra products that continued to embody the innovation and drive behind the brand.
Rewriting our future - New features, New possibilities
To serve our purpose, we have to make sure our products serve the needs of our users. Taking the time to understand better the possibilities we could unlock with our partners requires us to build new features to support new use cases.
API Stability - Income 2.0
Our API also made critical improvements in stability. Changes to our Income API set in motion a slew of updates that reflect our goal to provide reliable and stable products.
Webhooks and Events
We added some nifty new features to our dashboard making it easier to manage webhooks while also gaining visibility into user journeys.
New Widget Options
As part of our frequent widget updates, we provided a new widget option that allows clients to pre-select a bank, skipping the bank selection screens on the widget.
Bulk Payments on the Dashboard
Building on the API endpoint, you can now make bulk payments via CSV upload directly from the Okra dashboard.
New SDKs
We also built new SDKs this year making it easier for developers to integrate with our services. New SDKs - focused on Python, Android, Flutter and React Native - opened possibilities for developers of every stack to make new apps taking advantage of Okra’s APIs.
Quick payments
We launched a simplified widget experience for payments to minimize the number of steps the user has to go through to make a payment. With this configuration, returning users will not have to go through the entire widget flow any more, they simply go through a verification or MFA screen before instantly processing the transaction.
Documentation structure, and more...
Moreover, updates to our developer experience through our documentation made it easier to read, bringing guides to the forefront and making it easier to access our API reference.
We’ve squashed a ton of bugs too this year, we just may think about opening a pest control centre at this point.
Telling our story - The word on the street
From joining the World Economic Forum Technology Pioneers list for 2022 to sharing our vision on Forbes, it’s been an exciting year telling our story. We got a chance to share our journey and collaboration efforts with our partners. Here are some of our stories this year:
Breaking Changes - API First In Africa
Browserless - Top level browser automation
MongoDB - Digitizing Nigeria with Okra and MongoDB
LinkedIn - Top startups in Nigeria
Forbes - Taking on Open Finance in Africa
Forging Ahead - What’s next for 2023?
So what’s coming in 2023 for Okra? Well our focus continues to be driven by ensuring our customers get the bets possible experience on our APIs. We’re dedicated to making each of our products more stable while upping our velocity in updating the feature sets we currently have. We are excited for what all this will mean for our customers and the Open Finance ecosystem in Africa!
