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– Two entrepreneurs have unveiled Nigeria’s first online lender
– The unveiling ceremony was held yesterday, September 8, in New York
– The bank will be based in Lagos but will have no branches
Nigeria now has its first online bank. The digital bank named Lidya, will be based in Lagos with no other branches.
According to Bloomberg, the bank will offer small and medium-sized businesses unsecured loans of between $500 and $15,000.
READ ALSO: 5 essential safety measures Nigerians should adopt to defeat recession
The bank will initially focus on Nigerian customers, and then will make efforts to expand across major African cities, co-founder Tunde Kehinde declared.
Tunde Kehinde, co-founder Lidya
His words: “There are no real products catered to these customers today. What we’re trying to do is introduce a lot of technology, algorithms and machine learning to industrialize the credit assessment process.”
Kehinde, a Harvard Business School graduate, is a former managing director of Jumia, Nigeria’s biggest online retailer. He currently runs Africa Courier Express, a logistics company, along with Ercin Eksin, the other founder of Lidya.
While Kehinde and Eksin are the majority owners, they are also open to investments especially from interested shareholders and are looking to raise more than $1 million in the next few months.
Lidya will be opened next month and also partner with Nigerian banks to allow them to use it as a platform to target small businesses.
“Because of how the banks are set up, with bricks and mortar networks, they’re more inclined to service multinationals and large government institutions.
“Their cost structure isn’t favorable to servicing small businesses. Because we’re using technology and algorithms to assess the risk, it allows them to offer financial products to these customers at a low cost,” Kehinde submitted.
READ ALSO: Cross River state government to float its own airline
Meanwhile, most money deposit banks and insurance firms have slashed their workers’ salaries by between 20 and 50 per cent due to the economic recession currently ravaging Nigeria.
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