The department shutdown at Nomba follows a hiring freeze, but the company says that there is nothing out of the ordinary.diego-dalla-palma akutrekkingshop legioiedigea and-camicie gioie-di-gea mandarinaduckoutlet loevenichmutze guardianiscarpe loevenichhutkaufen kleankanteentrinkflasche 24bottles akuscarpe 24bottles harmontblainescarpe kleankanteentrinkflasche

Nomba, a Nigerian agency banking startup, has shut down its customer retention department, laying off an undisclosed number of its staff and absorbing the rest to its other teams. Around the same time, the former leader of the now-absolved customer retention team moved to the switching company Interswitch. According to reliable sources, there is also a hiring freeze across the company.

Nomba’s CEO, Adeyinka Adewale, told TechCabal that the layoffs were performance-based and merely a part of the cyclical life of the customer retention team, which he claims works on time-bound projects. He told TechCabal that they were hired on a fixed-term contract but did not specify how many staff were on the team before and after the firings.

“We have over 350 staff, and at one point or another, employees go beyond their job descriptions to do things like sales, customer support, and customer retention,” said Adewale. “We only set up this team when we have a drive to retain customers, and sometimes the team members are let go if they do not meet expectations.”

Adewale did not specify how many employees were let go from the team but said that high performers were absorbed into full-time roles in other teams like customer support and sales because they had spent considerable time understanding its over 300,000 customers. 

On the other hand, Adewale confirmed reports of a hiring freeze across the company. “Q3 is when we make critical plans that will only mature in next year, so it makes better business sense to hire the necessary talent till then.” He said the company will inevitably see a lot of new hires by February.

This year has seen job cuts from well-funded fintech companies like Paystack, and even Nomba’s former competitor Kippa which recently exited the agency banking sector due to currency inflation and decreasing margins. Up until now, there has been no news of layoffs from Nomba, which announced a $30 million pre-Series B funding raise in May. The company raised the funding at a $150 million valuation led by San Francisco-based Base10 partners, with participation from Helios Digital Ventures, Shopify, Partech, and Khosla Ventures.

Formerly known as Kudi, the YC-backed company has substantially evolved from a natural language processing bot that assists people trying to make online payments to being a fully licensed payment service provider in Nigeria. Namba told TechCabal that it supports more than 300,000 businesses with its banking and payment solutions. In May, the company also claimed to process $1 billion in monthly transactions.

The company provides POS devices, and it has added omnichannel features that can reduce reconciliation time and financial errors for enterprise customers. “We have included menu software that allows waiters to take orders directly on the device. This will greatly reduce revenue losses for restaurants who often have to make several reconciliations on the backend,” the CEO told TechCabal. The company also said that it has partnered with several FMCG businesses, and it hopes to partner with startups like restaurant-tech Vendease to extend the reconciliation feature of its omnichannel POS devices to more inventory-based businesses.