Nigeria

Nigeria’s FairMoney Raises US$42 Million for Its Digital Banking Ambition

by Fintechnews Africa 7 July 2021

FairMoney, a Nigerian neobank with a credit-led model, announced that it had raised US$42 million in a Series B funding round.

The round was led by Tiger Global Management and other existing investors in previous rounds such as Newfund, Speedinvest, Flourish Ventures, and DST Partners.

The firm had recently received a microfinance bank license from the Central Bank of Nigeria to further its banking ambitions.

According to TechCrunch, FairMoney has disbursed over US$93 million in loans to its 1.3 million users who have made over 6.5 million loan applications. Meanwhile in India it had processed more than 500,000 loan applications from over 100,000 users.

FairMoney had previously raised US$11 million during its Series A funding round in September 2019 and US$1.4 million (€1.2 million) in seed finding in 2018.

Founded in 2017, FairMoney started off by providing instant loans and bill payments to its customers in Nigeria. The company had also made an expansion into the Indian market last year.

Laurin Nabuko Hainy

“We have received our MFB banking license which now enables us to open current accounts for our users, and we’re doing that on quite a big scale.

 

We opened accounts for our repeated and new customers, which I think is quite a unique company strategy because we don’t need to burn millions of dollars of customer acquisition cost on users like other competitors. I think all of that has enabled us to become sort of the largest digital bank in Nigeria.”

Laurin Nabuko Hainy, CEO of FairMoney said to TechCrunch.

Hainy continues saying that FairMoney’s “ambition is that by the end of the year, the customer has the full-fledged banking experience from P2P transfers and lending to debit cards and current accounts”.

The firm said that it is working on a number of additional services from savings products, stock trading, and potentially crypto-trading products. The release of the product offerings will depend on where the regulations is heading.