Kenyan startup Finplus has announced it has processed one million loans for over 260,000 small business and individuals since its launch 2.5 years ago.
Founded in 2017 by Kageni Wilson and Bernard Banta, Finplus provides fully-managed software to help financial services providers operate efficiently and scale cost-effectively in any market. The recent launch of Eksperten.com allows Danish consumers to compare loans online for personal, SMS, mobile, quick, car, and more than 20 categories of loans.
Its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform enables the easy creation, rapid launch and efficient management of digital deposit, loan and insurance products, and contains modular solutions that entirely automate or dramatically accelerate things like onboarding, KYC validation, risk decisioning, bulk collections and disbursements, and SMS and email communications.
Disrupt Africa reported in April Finplus had opened an office in Johannesburg to lead its expansion into the Southern Africa market, and the startup has since gained customers in South Africa and Swaziland. This expansion has helped it hit key milestones, with total loans processed passing the one million mark in the fourth quarter of 2019.
Finplus helped more than 100,000 unique MSMEs and individuals access credit in 2019, bringing the total number of borrowers who have accessed Finplus-enabled loans to over 260,000. The startup processed over US$160 million in loan value in 2019, up 250 per cent on 2018.
“This a great moment for us, and while crossing the one million loans milestone is pretty exciting, I’m actually more excited about the upward trend in the average loan amount disbursed on our platform, which grew from US$218 to US$900 this past year,” Wilson told Disrupt Africa.
“The lowest band of emergency borrowing is flush with access to low-friction credit, but if you’re a small business without formal bank relationships and needing larger amounts, you have very few options available and many that you find will involve enormous friction. This is the space where our customers find their success, using a combination of human due-diligence and relationship-building, co-piloted by Finplus automation technology.”
In 2020, Finplus plans to develop more innovative financing options for lenders to better serve MSMEs in developing countries via its first dedicated vertical lending solution, which will attempt to solve a specific financing gap in a massive market.
“We are eager to tackle such a monumental challenge in a novel way,” Wilson said.
