The End of the Road for Klump

A thank-you note from Celestine Omin and Olufunbi Falayi

Five years ago, we started Klump with a simple premise: let Nigerian consumers pay for goods and services in instalments at checkout (Buy Now, Pay Later), and make it fast. Sub-five-minute fast.

We believe we delivered on that promise. Klump grew from an idea into the BNPL engine for hundreds of merchants, including Jumia and Konga, two of the largest e-commerce companies in Nigeria and, by extension, Africa, and served thousands of customers along the way.

Today, with heavy hearts, we are announcing that Klump is shutting down. We are proud of what we built. Few things are as fulfilling as watching people use a product that once existed only in your imagination.

Over the past five years, we helped hundreds of merchants grow sales by reducing cart abandonment by as much as 45%, and helped customers buy things that would otherwise have taken them months to save for. For merchants without an e-commerce website, or the means to build one, we created Klump Commerce, a marketplace that brought them online. It meant a phone vendor in Computer Village, Lagos could offer BNPL to a customer in Calabar, Cross River State.

The Beginning

Traditional loans, even unsecured ones, typically took at least 24 hours to reach an underwriting decision. In lending, that counts as fast. But we understood early on that it would never work for commerce.

Shopping comes with instant gratification. The moment a customer clicks “checkout” and completes payment, they feel a rush and quietly start counting down to the moment the item is in their hands. Nobody wants to wait a day to find out whether the answer is yes or no for a loan application. Fast, efficient underwriting was non-negotiable.

So we chose to hold our own loan book. That gave us two advantages: speed of underwriting, and the freedom to write larger tickets and serve sectors traditional lenders wouldn’t touch. The experiment largely worked, and we set out to raise debt to fuel the next stage of growth. That didn’t go as planned. We couldn’t raise the kind of debt we needed.

The Pivot

When the debt raise fell through, we pivoted to building a marketplace for lenders, putting commercial banks, microfinance banks and finance houses in front of willing customers at the point of checkout.

The logic was simple. Banks have a mandate to lend. Merchants want to offer financing at the point of checkout: Buy Now, Pay Later. Customers want flexible payment options. Klump tied it all together with our proprietary technology, without taking on credit risk ourselves. We built an ecosystem that would have cost these lenders enormous time and resources to build on their own. A customer of Bank A could get a loan from Bank A, right at the point of checkout. Seamless.

Here’s how it worked: a customer shopping on Jumia fills their cart and clicks “Pay with Klump.” A window opens listing our lending partners. The customer selects their desired lending partner, most likely their bank or another lender, answers a few questions, and the lender returns a decision within minutes.

The model worked, but several challenges quickly became clear:

• Integration timelines. From first conversation to integration, testing and go-live, partnerships took anywhere from 6 to 18 months, and sometimes longer.

• Sector restrictions. Lenders were reluctant to finance certain sectors.

• Risk appetite. This was outside our control. However ambitious our plans, we couldn’t make lenders move at our pace.

• Ticket sizes. Some lenders would not lend above certain amounts.

And through those long integration cycles, we still had to find a way to keep the lights on.

On Partnerships

Partnerships can be long and brutal. Some took us close to three years to work through, both commercially and legally, and legal was always the 800-pound gorilla.

What We Learned

Fintech is a scale business. Scale comes in two forms: volume and distribution. To get massive volume, you need airtight distribution. “Build it, and they will come” rarely holds here.

You cannot outsource your core competencies. The late Tony Hsieh, founder of Zappos, made this point clearly in his book Delivering Happiness. We had ambitious plans to scale quickly, but our momentum was always tied to how fast our lending partners moved. To move at the speed we wanted, we needed our own capital and our own loan book. That never materialised.

The takeaway: be the master of your own fate, and control whatever gives you your greatest advantage.

Integration is harder than it looks. Most banks had internal underwriting systems, but few were designed with third-party platforms like ours in mind. In most cases, we co-designed those systems with the banks, then gave them time to build, test, and clear compliance and legal review. The bigger the institution, the more red tape. We badly underestimated how long and tedious this phase would be. Even so, we are proud to have helped several banks build their third-party consumer lending APIs.

The Acquisition Process

In Q4 of 2023, Klump got her first acquisition interest; after months of due diligence, that deal, unfortunately, fell through, largely because of alignment issues.

At the start of 2026, we faced a choice: raise additional capital or explore an acquisition. We believe Buy Now, Pay Later works best as a value-added service within a thriving financial services ecosystem, not as a standalone offering, so we chose to pursue an acquisition.

We held in-depth conversations with a lot of financial technology companies. For a handful of them, we were just too early in their lending journey, and for others, we weren’t a good fit. We received an offer, which we ultimately declined.

Closing

Klump raised approximately $1.2 million across two rounds: a seed round and an extension. Over the past five years, we have worked hard to be good stewards of that capital. We kept our burn as low as possible and built a product loved by both merchants and customers. In the end, headwinds knocked us off course, and Klump’s road has come to an end.

Thank You

To our investors: Seedcamp, Magic Fund, Yellowwood Capital, Resilience 17, Will Neale, Michael Pennington, D Global Ventures Fund, Hoaq Capital, Kickoff Africa, Voltron Capital, Kesho VC, First Circle, Babs Ogundeyi, Russel Cummer of Cummer Capital, Assembly Investors, Fast Forward, Magic Carpet Fortress LLC, Oladimeji Sofowora, Richmond Bassey, Abdul Ventures, Olumide Shoyombo and every individual investor who backed us. Thank you for taking this journey with us.

To our lending partners: First Bank, Credit Direct, Stanbic IBTC, Polaris Bank, Wema Bank, Fidelity Bank, RenMoney, Vida by VeendHQ, Propel and many others. We say a very big thank you.

To our merchants: Thank you for trusting us to serve your customers. We are especially grateful to Jumia, Konga, iStore and SLOT.

To our customers: Thank you for choosing Klump and for every purchase you made through us.

To our colleagues: Past and present: Jenrande, Jerry, Kingsley, Pamela, Edmond, Kunle, Imo-owo, Rebecca, Emmanuel, Folakemi, Seun and Temitope. We can’t thank you enough. Klump would not exist without your hard work. Thank you for your trust and for the faith you placed in us.

Postscript

Access to credit remains an unsolved problem. We still believe it can be solved, and solved meaningfully.

— The Klump Team

I'll love to hear from you

Do you want to say hello? Email me - celestineomin@gmail.com

I tweet at @cyberomin