With Duplo, distributors can create unique virtual accounts for retailers and agents to make real-time payments or bank transfers, while the platform helps to reconcile their books automatically. But in the FMCG industry, there’s isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach. The platform also helps these companies to generate or pay invoices, offer credit to their business customers and a dashboard to attribute payment flows to a particular customer, retailer or location. The company, which launched its pilot three months ago, said customers reported cost savings of more than 12% within that period. The YC-backed startup has also raised a $1.3 million pre-seed round led by early-stage pan-African VC firm Oui Capital to further its growth. Yele Oyekola, a former product lead at Carbon, started Duplo based on his experience as an economic policy officer for the UN in Africa, where touring different countries opened his eyes to how people and businesses were heavily reliant on cash.“We are trying to make cash obsolete in Africa where lots of businesses in the distribution space heavily transact in cash for obvious reasons,” said the chief executive officer to TechCrunch in an interview.“So, we’re focused on distributors, merchants and aggregators to stop the use of cash in this value chain because everyone knows how expensive cash is and how difficult it is to move with issues around theft and fraud.” Duplo doesn’t have any issues with that, as retailers can still make transactions to these same virtual accounts via the mobile money agents; reconciliation is carried out after that. Currently, it has processed over $380,000; however, Duplo has plans to reach $40 million in annualized TPV by the end of Q2, said the CEO.