Published: November 6, 2019
The mobile banking startup FairMoney, which offers loans to Nigerian customers, has raised €10mn to expand into a fully-fledged digital bank.
In September, the fintech startup FairMoney closed a €10mn series A investment round, led by the venture fund Flourish. FairMoney, which started out as a micro-lending app in Nigeria, wants to expand its services to become a complete mobile banking platform.
“The ambition always was to become a digital bank, a one-stop place for people to manage their financial lives,” Ameya Upadhyay, principal at Flourish and new FairMoney board member, tells EMEA Finance. “If you think of your friends, you think of Facebook, and if you think of money, you should think of FairMoney – that’s the ambition.”
Launched in 2017, FairMoney is a Paris-based mobile bank that seeks to serve customers in large emerging markets, beginning initially with Nigeria. So far, it has around 200,000 users, who predominantly use FairMoney to fund their small business needs. Customers in this bracket would otherwise struggle to access loans, since they don’t have a credit score.