How Seven built a business banking MVP in one month with Blnk

Seven offers instant, low-fee global payments and multi-currency support for merchants and businesses.

Challenge

Seven needed to quickly launch a cross-border payments solution for merchants in Nigeria, enabling them make payments to countries like India, Bangladesh, the US, and the UK. They wanted a system that could easily handle transactions in different currencies.

The team was familiar with traditional core banking softwares (CBAs), but they were expensive, slow to set up, and often required external support.

For Seven, this approach was too slow and expensive. They needed a simpler, more cost-effective way to get to market quickly.

Why use Blnk?

The criteria for a ledger partner

Yousend needed a fintech Core that could help them build their MVP fast, while checking all of the boxes on quality, compliance, and accuracy. Their top requirements were:

Self-hostable without requiring large infrastructure;
Easy to implement with minimal configuration;
Lightweight, i.e., they could use only what they needed;
Cost-effective and suitable for a startup team;
Developer-friendly, with available SDKs to simplify integration;
Able to scale into features like fraud detection and anomaly monitoring when needed.

I wanted a cost-effective ledger I could host myself, but one that didn’t require much configuration to get started. I needed something that worked out of the box.

Udori Ekpin,

Founder & CEO

Solution

Seven adopted Blnk Core as the foundation for its cross-border payments engine. This enabled the team to move quickly, handle multiple currencies from day one, and build with confidence.

Double-entry out of the box

Seven didn’t need to design accounting logic or think through how balances should update. Blnk handled that from day one.

With double-entry built in, the team could track money flows across customer wallets, internal ledgers, and external payouts, all with audit trails and consistent balance logic.

“One thing I know is… handling my double entry and accounting — accounting by itself makes my work harder, makes my work more complex. I have to think too much on how money will move across systems.”

Multi-currency support

Seven needed to support payments in USD, GBP, INR, and BDT from the start. With Blnk, they didn’t need to write separate logic for each — making it easy to manage different currency corridors without duplicating work.

This made it easy to onboard different payment corridors quickly and manage currency movement without duplicating ledger logic.

Fast, hassle-free integration

The team at Seven moved from technical planning to production in under a month, with minimal support. Blnk’s documentation and SDKs gave them everything they needed to build and launch.

With Blnk, I didn’t need anybody. As long as we could read the docs, setup was very easy.

Extensible for future use cases

With Blnk Finance, Seven got a system that grows with them. As they take on more merchants and process more payments, they won’t need to rebuild anything. Features like fraud detection, anomaly monitoring, and advanced identity support are already part of the platform and easy to add when needed.

This gave the team confidence that as they move from pilot to full launch, their ledger won’t hold them back or force them to spend months building complex tools themselves.

Outcome

Seven launched their cross-border payments product in under a month. Blnk handled core transaction logic from the start, so the team could focus on onboarding partners and managing money movement.

Today, they process live transactions across multiple currencies for payroll, supplier payouts, and more, and they continue to add more currencies as they grow.

Everything runs on top of Blnk Core, giving the team full control over their system while keeping operations lean and reliable.