With over 600 million mobile subscribers and close to 350 million people online in Africa today. Tunde Kehinde, Co founder of Africa Courier Express (ACE) believes that digital banking is the next step for Africa. Africa Courier Express (ACE) co-founders, Tunde Kehinde and Ercin Eksin just announced the impending launch of Lydia, a financial services platform that’ll provide unsecured loans of between $500 and $15,000 to SMEs in Africa.
Lidya aims to industrialize the risk assessment process and capitalise on the huge technological advancements in machine learning and related technologies to unlock relevant financial products for today’s young, mobile and entrepreneurial customer. Lidya is going to be a “digital bank” (i.e. no physical branches) and users will be able to do everything they normal would with a bank – open accounts, save money, build credit profiles and have access credit to loans.
According to Tunde Kehinde, “In my experience, there are two clear barriers hindering the successful development of economies across Africa. ACE was founded to address the infrastructural challenges preventing companies from connecting with their customers. Lidya is our solution for the over 300 million consumers on the continent who have bank accounts but don’t have access to credit, trade finance and personal investing tools to grow their businesses and plan their futures.”
Co-founder Ercin Eksin says, “We estimated the credit gap in Africa to be several hundred billion US dollars. To unlock capital for customers that do not have access to credit; innovative forms of banking backed with world-class customer experience must be developed. Lidya is revolutionizing how risk is assessed, credit is disbursed and customers are banked.”
Lidya will soon be open to the public and they’ll be partnering with Nigerian banks so they can target SMEs better.
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