Flutterwave discontinues Barter in order to concentrate on its enterprise and remittance businesses.

The largest startup in Africa, Flutterwave, is discontinuing Barter, a virtual card service it introduced in 2017, in order to concentrate on its enterprise and remittance business areas. Over the previous month, the fintech advised users to take out their money through the app.

The fintech company informed their clients via email and in-app prompts that “the decision to sunset Barter was based on a comprehensive analysis of market trends and evolving customer needs.”

By concentrating on remittance and enterprise, Flutterwave is increasing its bet on tried-and-true solutions. The fintech said to TechCabal in October that its largest source of income was enterprise services. In contrast, one of the business’s cofounders told Quartz Africa in 2018 that Barter made up just 1% of the $2 billion in transactions made by the company.

The corporation stated, “Although we still value retail, our current priorities are remittance solutions and business service optimization.”

In the meantime, Send and Swap, two of Flutterwave’s remittance products, want to take a sizable chunk of the $54 billion African remittance market. How far forward both products have come is uncertain.

Barter is a legendary good. One of the first software businesses to give Nigerians the opportunity to make overseas payments was this one, which debuted in 2017.

A TechCabal Daily article announcing its launch in March 2017 stated, “Barter will leverage on Flutterwave’s virtual card API and platform to allow users create an unlimited number of virtual dollar cards for single or repeat transactions.” However, there have been some issues with the product.

For several weeks in 2022, Barter was inaccessible due to “an update from the company’s card partner.”Union54, a card issuer in Zambia that was the target of a $1.2 billion chargeback fraud attempt, was that partner.

Consumer complaints also included card rejections by retailers, such as Netflix, Facebook, PayPal, and Apple Music, and platform outages.