This archive report was first published on 16 September 2019.
On September 16, 2019, FairMoney, a Paris-based fintech startup, closed a $10 million-euro Series A round of investment to use alternative smartphone data to underwrite microcredit in Nigeria.
Founded in 2017 by CEO Laurin Hainy, FairMoney is a mobile bank for emerging markets. The company began with mobile lending but is rapidly expanding its service offering to build a full-fledged digital bank focused on serving underserved consumers in large emerging markets, such as Nigeria.
Led by Flourish, a venture of The Omidyar Group, the partners of DST Global, and existing seed investors Newfund, Speedinvest, and Le Studio VC, the firm will use today's funding to scale its engineering team to develop a fully-fledged mobile banking offering in Nigeria and beyond.
With over 200,000 customers to date, FairMoney has introduced an in-app payment function, allowing users to top up their phone subscriptions, buy mobile data, pay electricity or internet bills, and facilitating more than 400 payments daily.
“Our vision is to build a holistic financial platform for underserved customers in emerging markets. We want to do that by offering an easy-to-use product to our customers and become a financial one-stop-shop for them,” said Laurin Hainy, CEO of FairMoney.
