Kora, a Nigerian-based payment infrastructure firm has partnered with the Government of Birmingham through the West Midlands Growth Company, an organization responsible for driving regional investment promotion and economic development.

Kora offers payment API for payment collections and disbursements and has now launched its first UK office.

According to the Chief Operating Officer at Kora, Gideon Oroywiroro, the ambition for Kora since day one has been to make Africa open from a financial standpoint and this new office is an important step for the startup.

Birmingham, which is at the center of the UK’s technology-fastest-growing region, was selected as Kora’s first UK office due to its strong infrastructure and easy access to talent.

With this partnership, the West Midlands Growth Company will support Kora’s ambition to provide the infrastructure that allows local African businesses to go global and global companies to go local in Africa.

“We are excited to have a partner in the West Midlands Growth Company whose ambition is aligned with ours; to remove barriers for local and global commerce,” Gideon Oroywiroro said.

In order to facilitate remittances to Africa by Africans living abroad, Kora launched operations in Nigeria in 2018. Since then, it has developed into an African payment infrastructure that enables multinational corporations to quickly expand across Africa. Businesses can collect pay-ins, and payouts, and settle across popular payment channels with only one connection while using Kora. Its cross-border product is accessible to companies in 25 different African nations.

The Central Bank of Nigeria granted Kora its commercial PSSP license earlier this year, further enabling the business to advance its goal of establishing open standards for payments throughout Africa.