Nigeria’s Indicina Secures $3M from Target Global to Help Lenders Give Credit to their Customers
Nigeria-based fintech startup, Indicina which uses data to solve the loan eligibility challenge for lenders has secured $3 million in Target Global-led seed round to expand into new markets in Africa, reinforce its key product offerings, build more products for consumers’ credit recommendation, and bolster its infrastructure.
Yvonne Johnson launched Indicina with Jacob Ayokunle and Carlos del Carpio in 2019 as an intermediary between the lenders and the borrowers, where the former can utilize for credit scoring and bank statement analysis, getting access to ML-driven financial analytics and improved insights into borrowers they currently don’t have and derisk unsecured loans. Also, lenders who process loan applications manually can use the platform to double or triple their volume without blowing up their loan books.
Greycroft and RV Ventures also participated in the round. This adds to the list of startups supported by Target Global in Nigeria – Kuda, Kippa, and Edukoya. Its partner, Ricardo Schäefer will join Indicina’s board.
Lack of access to credit facilities by the retail and SME sub-sector of the economy in Nigeria prompted Johnson to quit her job as an executive with First Bank, one of Nigeria’s leading banks to found the fintech startup to provide credit rails and financial analytics tools for these businesses which are shutout by the formal banking sector.
“We’ve never had any balance sheet. It’s never been about offering credit for us. We want to focus on the infrastructure layer and provide good infrastructure for people to feel more comfortable. We want lenders to be better informed about the decisions around credit so they can go to market faster with their digital products. So we’ve never had a business model that included our balance sheet, which we’ve always worked with the lenders,” the CEO said.
Target Global and Greycroft partners, Schäefer and Will Szcxzerbiak attributed Indicina’s unique approach to solving the continent’s credit challenge as to why they backed Indicina “because it uses data to solve the loan eligibility problem previously decided by incomplete creditworthiness assessments.”
Indicina works with credit bureaus and open finance platforms to deepen financial inclusion through seamless access to loans by micro businesses. Some of its partners include Polaris Bank, LipaLater, VFD, Zilla, and CreditDirect. According to the information on Indicina’s website, it has helped these clients process over 5 million loans from 10,000 bank statements and disbursed over 1.17 million.
The startup earns its revenue from API calls made by its customers when analyzing financial documents. It plans to launch a B2C offering in the coming weeks to diversify offerings and revenue streams.
“We have been working with the lenders; now we want to involve consumers. So they see what the lender would see if they are going to apply for a loan,” Johnson explained.
Indicina currently operates in Nigeria and Kenya. It plans to use the funds to expand into more African markets, and iterations, as well as deepen product development and hire more data scientists and machine learning engineers.