The informal trade networks that move consumer goods across West Africa are vast, fragmented, and largely invisible to the manufacturers supplying them. OmniRetail has now built a platform to change that and embedded financing directly into the infrastructure.
OmniRetail, a B2B e-commerce platform operating in Nigeria, Ghana, and Côte d'Ivoire, has launched OmniOne, a digital platform designed to help FMCG manufacturers scale their distribution networks while embedding financial services into day-to-day trade operations.
OmniOne is not a replacement for OmniBiz, the company's existing retail commerce engine. While OmniBiz continues to drive orders and fulfilment, OmniOne aggregates that activity into a single interface for manufacturers, giving them real-time visibility into demand, distributor warehouses, and retail sell-through rates. A manufacturer can access a consolidated dashboard covering customer analytics, order values, quantities sold, new and returning customers, and churn data intelligence that traditional distribution models have never been able to deliver.
The financing dimension is where the product breaks new ground. Creditworthiness on the platform is determined using transaction and behavioural data, including purchase history, order frequency, repayment patterns, and inventory movement, rather than traditional collateral. This allows distributors and retailers to access working capital based on actual business activity, opening formal credit to players who have historically been locked out of it.
The market opportunity behind the product is enormous. Citing NielsenIQ data, OmniRetail notes that Nigeria and Kenya's FMCG markets grew 18.1% in value in 2023, with traditional trade accounting for 98% of the retail landscape, yet the distribution layer powering that market remains highly fragmented, relying on chains of distributors, sub-distributors, and informal retailers with little data visibility or access to finance.
OmniRetail's platform scale gives OmniOne an immediate foundation. The company already has visibility into over 500,000 FMCG orders worth ₦250 billion ($182 million) monthly, across 10,000 distributors and 100,000 retailers.
Founder and CEO Deepankar Rustagi was unambiguous about what the launch represents: "OmniBiz has earned the trust, built the network, and generated the data that makes OmniOne possible. Manufacturers, distributors, and financial institutions can now plug into what we have built and scale faster alongside us."
The product launch comes one year after OmniRetail's $20 million Series A, and the company says it will deepen its AI capabilities to strengthen the connection between commerce, finance, and data visibility going forward.
For an FMCG sector where manufacturers routinely lose margin to opacity, stockouts, and payment delays across long distribution chains, OmniOne arrives as both a diagnostic tool and a commercial lever designed to make traditional trade as legible and financeable as modern retail.
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