Flutterwave shuts down Barter as it refocuses on enterprise and remittance business

Flutterwave, Africa’s largest startup, is discontinuing Barter, a virtual card service that it launched in 2017, to focus on its enterprise and remittance business areas. Customers were urged by the fintech company to withdraw their money from the app within the last month.

“The decision to sunset Barter was based on a comprehensive analysis of market trends and evolving customer needs,” the company explained in an email to TechCabal.

Flutterwave is doubling down on established winners, focusing on remittance and enterprise. In October, the fintech told TechCabal that enterprise services were its major income source. In 2018, one of the company’s co-founders told Quartz Africa that barter represented only about 1% of the company’s $2 billion in transactions.

“While retail remains important to us, our immediate focus is optimizing services for businesses and remittance solutions,” the business said in a statement.

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Meanwhile, Flutterwave’s remittance products, Send and Swap, seek to gain a large piece of Africa’s $54 billion remittance market. It is uncertain how far both products have progressed.

Read also: Flutterwave’s new product, Swap, aims to ease Nigeria’s forex problems.

Barter is a storied product. When it began in 2017, it was one of the first tech businesses to allow Nigerians to make overseas payments.

“Barter will leverage Flutterwave’s virtual card API and platform to allow users to create an unlimited number of virtual dollar cards for single or repeat transactions,” announcing its launch in March 2017. But the product has had its share of problems.

In 2022, Barter was inaccessible for many weeks due to “an update from the company’s card partner.” That partner was Union54, a Zambian card issuer who was struck with a $1.2 billion chargeback fraud.

Customers also complained about platform outages and card rejections from merchants such as Netflix, Facebook, PayPal, and Apple Music.

Techrectory with Agency Report.