NowNow raises $13 million seed fund, plans to expand ecosystem of financial products across Africa TechCrunch
In 2011, the Nigerian government launched a program of financial inclusion initiative and set a goal to include 80% of the country’s adult population. Despite only achieving the 64% target by the end of the decade, one positive from the internship is that achieving financial inclusion nationally remains an ongoing process that sees fintechs joined the banks in recent years.
Correspondent banks The upstarts are the main innovators in this area. Their branchless banking system, consisting of thousands of physical agents, provides financial services to the unbanked and underbanked in rural and semi-urban areas. NowNow Digital Systemsuch a platform launched in 2018, has raised $13 million in a seed round that will allow the four-year-old startup to scale and expand its offerings across Africa .
When the CEO Sahir Berry and his co-founder Mahesh Naira founded NowNow in 2016, they wanted to provide solutions for financial inclusion and job creation, two of the biggest challenges they say are facing Nigeria and the rest of the continent. According to Berry, in partnership with a foreign third-party partner, NowNow launched a mobile wallet in late 2017 but they soon realized they needed to build on their technology, setting the stage for a market launch. school next year. “Doing that and building our proprietary IP changed our business,” the CEO said. “So to begin with, we provided digital banking solutions for consumers and businesses. But today, we are rapidly becoming an embedded financial platform. “
NowNow claims to have built an end-to-end ecosystem of financial products catering to dealers, individual consumers, and small businesses. Its mainstream product, similar to other correspondent banking platforms like OPay, TeamAptand Nomba, involving more than 50,000 agents across the country who provide financial services to Nigerians such as sending, receiving money and paying bills. The fintech company also has a consumer-facing product where people can send and receive money, pay bills, and access value-added services like insurance and loans via debit cards. and wallet in one app. This service is available to users with smartphones and feature phones; For the latter, however, they will need agents to access other services, Berry said. Analogue digital banking providers in this segment include Kuda, Carbon and FairMoney.
According to Berry, NowNow wants to set itself apart from the competition with the development of NFC-enabled technology that will enable touch functionality in its ecosystem of products, where users can use their cards. virtual or physical card on an NFC-enabled phone or POS machine and tap from wallet to wallet with two phones. This product has been made available to a number of small businesses for testing during the pilot phase. NowNow, on the other hand, typically provides these SMEs with a business platform out of the box with value-added tools and services like storefronts and marketplaces.
“It is an end-to-end integrated platform for SMEs, including logistics, and we are the first company in Nigeria to offer an end-to-end platform,” said Berry. end like that. More than that, because we built all this technology and own the IP for it, we have also become a BaaS company supplying our products to many fintechs in Nigeria and Africa. We also have well-known financial institutions that use our products to provide white label solutions to their clients. So that mitigates the risk we’re playing in the consumer and B2B space. “
NowNow is targeting 5,000 SME businesses with a business solution in a box, including NFC-enabled technology, by the end of the year. On the consumer side, the fintech claims to serve up to 200,000 customers; it hopes to increase that to 1 million by December. Berry added: “We are on track to trade a GMV worth around $5 billion by the end of the year across all platforms.
With the new funds secured, NowNow plans to grow its platform, team and marketing to the scale the company is “now ready to embrace”. Fintech technology, recently selected to join Mastercard Start Path Global seed program, Series A and later-stage startups, also want to introduce new products to enhance its existing merchant, merchant and consumer banking payment solutions, and expanding into African countries that fintech from Nigeria rarely travels to: Angola and Liberia.
“We want to work in countries where we find that the infrastructure is crippled and requires fintech to step in and see what solutions can be provided to address the situation. Angola is one of those places where we realize that the digital payments space is quite far away and we could launch there in the next month. Liberia is another country where we are preparing to set up operations.”
The seed round welcomes the participation of a number of companies, including principal investors venture capital firm and Dubai-based studio NeoVision Ventures, India-based DLF Family Office and Shadi Abdulhadi.
