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We live in a world of instant global communication. Yet the business of sending money abroad has remained stuck in the past. Many money transfer companies still make their customers visit an agent and fill-out bits of paper. And despite the inconvenience, their rates are often punishing.

We empower individuals with access to credit, simple payments solutions, high-yield investment opportunities and easy-to-use tools for personal financial management. Carbon is headquartered in Lagos, Nigeria. We are a global company of over 90 employees with operations in Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya

Carbon is a financial service provided by Carbon Finance & Investments Limited (RC 1044655), licensed and regulated by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN). We empower individuals with credit, simple payments solutions, high-yield investment opportunities, and easy-to-use tools for personal financial management. We are a global company of over 90 employees with a presence in Mauritius, Nigeria, the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, South Africa, and Kenya.

SimbaPay (http://www.SimbaPay.com) is revolutionizing the remittance space through its official announcement of raising the single transaction limit to a whopping $45,000. This is substantially higher than the previous transaction limit of $3,000. According to Victor Karanja, Head of Operations at SimbaPay, sending money home and buying property across Africa has just become a whole lot easier. “A pain point for customers in the past has been having to undertake multiple transfers to complete a single purchase.” “A key risk with multiple transfers was exchange rate fluctuation. Sending up to $45,000 with just our mobile app will protect senders from the fluctuation that arises when one splits up the transfer,” said Karanja.

M-Pesa has 20.5 million customers across a network of 176,000 agents and generates around one-fourth ($531 million) of Safaricom’s ≈ $2.2 billion annual revenues (2018). The company has held nearly 75% of the mobile-money market share in Kenya for nearly a decade and the country has the highest mobile-money usage rates in Africa.

So far JUMO has analysed more than 33 terabytes of data to serve more than nine million customers in seven countries across Africa and Asia, including Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, Zambia and Pakistan.

Its mission is to build and operate inclusive digital banking marketplaces to advance financial inclusion for the 80 per cent of the world’s population who are excluded or underserved by traditional financial services.

As an investor partner, LeapFrog’s financial services expertise is being used for product design and multi-country rollouts, to turbocharge Jumo’s growth and spur financial inclusion across Africa.

Smartel Money Ltd is company that is rooted in the Kingdom of Lesotho. The aim and focus of Smartel money is to provide mobile payment services, savings & credit and monetary transfers and serve thus as an alternative to traditional banking systems. We aim to provide to individuals, institutions, organizations, multi-industry sectors and governments with the cutting edge, fresh and innovative financial management system in this ever changing world. We also aim to improve the quality of cloud computing (payment as a service) and interaction between computers and people to achieve their payment processes.

Smartel Money Ltd is company that is rooted in the Kingdom of Lesotho. The aim and focus of Smartel money is to provide mobile payment services, savings & credit and monetary transfers and serve thus as an alternative to traditional banking systems.

Anlesinya et al (2014)16 examined whether corporate social responsibility has significant positive effect on the financial performance of MTN Ghana Limited. The study administered questionnaire on 35 management staff of MTN Ghana Limited, employed standard multiple regression and hierarchical multiple regression for the analysis. The research results showed that CSR at the aggregate level did not have significant positive effect on financial performance but community CSR has a positive while environmental CSR has negative effect on financial performance of MTN Ghana Limited. The study however has left key performance indicators of MTN Ghana unexplored lending support for a more comprehensive study in that regard. Vadiraj and Narahari (2014)1 attempted to develop a model that could predict the future trends of average revenue per user (ARPU) so that telecom service providers could formulate a strategy to increase their ARPU. The study using a multiple linear regression has been able to explain that subscriber base; number of operators and percentage of new users added periodically are the main determinants of average revenue per user (ARPU). Rahul and Xue (2012)17 attempted to examine the relationship between some selected factors and their contribution to the revenue of the Telecom industries in China and India. Using time series data collected from secondary sources from 2000 to 2010 on number of subscribers, technology innovation, and government regulation and policies, their granger causality test found no causality running from number of subscribers to the revenue of the telecom Industry in both China and India. They however found a causality running from technological innovation to the revenue of the Telecom Industries in both countries. Shmelev (2013)18 developed a model for calculating Telecom Company’s revenue and margin indicators. The study crafted the model for calculating the revenue of Telecom companies based on the Business Metric Framework (BMF) developed by the TeleManagement Forum, a global non-profit association for service providers in the Telecommunication sector. Examining the relationship between the two categories of KPIs in the BMF, the study concluded that it is possible to  create a function depending on the target KPIs lower levels, to calculate the final financial indicator at given rates and obtain a performance management  tool based on key performance indicators.  

Kiva is a non-profit lending platform well known for its microloan service targeted underserved markets globally. Lendio states that the program has now provided over $500,000 in microloans to business owners worldwide, 98% of whom are female. Lendio first launched the program in 2016. The company describes the program as part of its commitment to entrepreneurship and inclusivity. Lendio provides a microloan to a low-income entrepreneur for every new loan facilitated on its marketplace platform. This voluntary employee-contributed, employer-matched program reports a 94% participation rate among Lendio employees.

The most obvious benefit of crowdfunding for entrepreneurs is the funding. With so many startups on the market, it is hard to gather the money needed to bring ideas to life. Through crowdfunding, ventures that do not have a company builder like FinLeap behind them, can gain support at the very beginning. Crowdfunding provides a way for innovate ideas to be presented attractively, so it can be launched. Moreover, a crowdfunding platform can help successful entrepreneurs to validate their product which can then help with gathering the Series A funding. It makes validation faster and more scalable. Additionally, a crowdfunding platform allows entrepreneurs to get insights from their future customers and experts in the startup field while building awareness for the idea. [3]

The basic model of the Kiva intermediary model, illustrated in Figure 1, is that small lenders lend to Kiva. Kiva lends to MFIs. These MFIs then lend to poor people. Thus the MFIs are using Kiva as a financing agency. Kiva is actually providing a service to small lenders who want to participate directly in the microfinance movement. In the Kiva model, there is no interest given by Kiva to the lender and no interest charged by Kiva to the MFI. However, the MFI charges normal interest rates to the poor borrower. Kiva is a not-forprofit.

n 2012, the micro-lending institute Kiva partnered with Kenya’s Strathmore University to offer tuition loans to low-income students. The loans were crowdfunded by Kiva and distributed by Strathmore University, who selected applicants based on the criteria of having high academic performance and coming from a low-income household, among other requirements. From 2012 to 2018, Kiva fundraised USD 762,675, which was distributed to 84 students who received an average loan of USD 9,004. The program ended in 2018 because the delinquency rate had risen to 14.65%, with many students being unable to pay back their loan owing to scarce job opportunities after graduation (Kiva, 2018).

In 2012, the micro-lending institute Kiva partnered with Kenya’s Strathmore University to offer tuition loans to low-income students. The loans were crowdfunded by Kiva and distributed by Strathmore University, who selected applicants based on the criteria of having high academic performance and coming from a low-income household, among other requirements. From 2012 to 2018, Kiva fundraised USD 762,675, which was distributed to 84 students who received an average loan of USD 9,004

And finally in Kiva's defense, its behavior is emblematic of fund-raising in microfinance and charity generally, and is ultimately traceable to human foibles. People donate in part because it makes them feel good. Giving the beneficiary a face and constructing a story for her in which the donor helps write the next chapter opens purses. The pleasure of giving

Kiva is the path-breaking, fast-growing person-to-person microlending site. It works this way: Kiva posts pictures and stories of people needing loans. You give your money to Kiva. Kiva sends it to a microlender. The lender makes the loan to a person you choose. He or she ordinarily repays. You get your money back with no interest. It's like eBay for microcredit.

You knew that, right? Well guess what: you're wrong, and so is Kiva's diagram. Less that 5% of Kiva loans are disbursed after they are listed and funded on Kiva's site. Just today, for example, Kiva listed a loan fepor Phong Mut in Cambodia and at this writing only $25 of the needed $800 has been raised. But you needn't worry about whether Phong Mut will get the loan because it was disbursed last month. And if she defaults, you might not hear about it: the intermediating microlender MAXIMA might cover for her in order to keep its Kiva-listed repayment rate high.

Most smallholder Kenyan farmers are excluded from the financial system because they do not have a satisfactory credit profile. Without access to formal credit systems, they use alternative systems providing credit at high-interest rates, which, in addition, are not well suited to support their farm and off-farm activities.Having done this, the FarmDrive team met banks and organisations financing smallholder farmers to better understand the reasons for exclusion. They discovered that it is often the lack of information that locks farmers out of the financial system. They decided to try to fill this gap by collecting information from farmers, and analysing the data obtained, establishing their credit profile. Once this is done, farmers can apply for a loan via the platform FarmDrive.

African smallholder farmers face a recurring problem of access to finance and credit. Financial institutions, for their part, do not have access to many potential customers, considered as too risky. Young Kenyan computer scientists have developed FarmDrive, an application that aims to promote access to credit and financial services for smallholder farmers. banks remain to be won over, but the project is on track.

FinTechs and the Value Chains in the Financial IndustryIt is beneficial to remember how things worked before and after FinTechs and TechFins or big techs in the financial industry.Banking models are shifting significantly from a pipeline, vertical, paradigm, to modular solutions that pave the way to new banking paradigms that entail higher levels of openness toward third parties and a growing number of modular services bundled together.Value is created in platforms through economies of scope in production and innovation (Gawer, 2014). In order for platforms to work, adoption and network effects are essential. Models can go to mere compliance with the prescriptions of openness of PSD2, to the inclusion of new services, the opening of the banking core and data, and the aggregation of those within a platform experience. In particular, we assist both to the evolution of a Bank-as-a-Platform model and a tech-platform-driven model supporting banking and financial intermediation, which both constitute a new interesting field of analysis.Since the wave of digital transformation started entering the financial industr

, banking-as-a-business has started moving from a product/service perspective to more contextual solutions where providers are customer needs-driven. This is because customer-driven companies outperform the shareholder-driven ones, and this requires an outside-in approach.Having said that, it is beneficial to remember that digital transformation implies four main categories of innovation (product, process, organizational and business model) (Omarini, 2019, p. 340); all of them require rediscovering that a new strategy paradigm exists. This regards the concept of co-creation, and because of this no single firm can unilaterally carry out a process of continuous experimentation, risk reduction, time compression, and minimizing investment while maximizing market impact. Co-creation requires access to resources from extended networks (suppliers, partners, and consumer communities).Under these new market conditions, FinTechs have become an important piece of a bigger puzzle, each one in its own area of business (payment, lending, etc.), while at the beg

inning most of them started as mono-business companies. Only a few of them may become leaders in the market. On the one hand, there are those that make their strategy become international, and on the other, there are FinTechs which enlarge their services-scopes. However, the majority of them will become part of ecosystems where the direction could swing from banks to tech companies or to FinTechs as well, able to manage the network by developing kinds of conglomerate-as-a-service.Another interesting point to outline regards this recent period where all of us have experienced lockdowns around the world, and some effects have also impacted FinTechs as well. The valuations of most unicorns have crashed overnight, while on the FinTechs side there are different situations. Some of them have experienced a dramatic reduction in their

Moving forward, banks are now able to partner with fintech startups with ease. Most noteworthy, startups are developing as cloud-native from the very start. The global fintech market size expects to grow to $124.3 billion USD by the end of 2025 at a Compound Annual Growth Rate of 23.84%

As an increasing number of businesses make the move to adopt a digital payment system, the demand for fintech solutions is only expected to grow and drive market growth.

Nigerian fintech firm Carbon — an early-stage financial services startup based in Lagos — has posted on its website financials audited by KPMG.This comes four months after the company obtained a credit rating as a pre-IPO venture. Carbon — which recently rebranded its OneFi holding company and PayLater product titles into one name — plans to continue releasing its financial results on an annual basis, co-founder and CEO Chijioke Dozie told TechCrunch.This may not be totally unheard of in other global tech markets, but for startups in Africa’s big tech hubs — such as Nigeria — it’s a rarity.One of the first glimpses into startup financials in Nigeria came when Jumia shareholder Rocket Internet went public in 2014, which required it to include limited Jumia data in its annual report. The accompanying prospectus to Jumia’s listing this year on the New York Stock Exchange offered the most expansive financial data to date on a tech venture operating in Africa.Prior to this — and still for the most part — companies in the continent’s (mostly) pre-public (earlier-stage) startup hubs — such as Nigeria — provide little to no financial performance info.“Typically, in the local market, we have not seen a lot of voluntary transparency or the availability of data,” said Lexi Novitske — a Lagos-based VC investor at Acuity Venture Partners.“Most startups are concerned such disclosure could expose losses, give market intel to competitors or attract unwanted attention from regulators. It could also lead to negative negotiation leverage if partners saw that they were making good returns.”So why’d Carbon go to the trouble of putting its pre-public accounting out in the open for anyone to see?

Clients and recruiting were two reasons. “From a customer perspective, we are trying to get people to trust us with their financial services…so they can see this is the institution I’m dealing with and this is their financial position,” explained Carbon’s Dozie.Carbon has evolved from its original focus as an online lender to offer a broader array of mobile-based financial services — including payments, investment products, credit reports and business banking services. In March, the company acquired Nigerian payment solutions company Amplify for an undisclosed amount.By stats offered by Briter Bridges and a 2018 WeeTracker survey, fintech now receives the bulk of VC capital and deal-flow to African startups, many of which are attempting to reach the continent’s large unbanked and underbanked populations.Carbon fits into that category and its CEO believes being upfront about the startup’s financial position will attract top talent. “From a recruitment perspective, we want recruits to know we have good prospects — that this is a company that’s doing well and wants to keep doing well,” said Dozie.That impression is buoyed by Carbon’s initial results, which were fairly positive for a Series A-stage startup. The company had revenues in 2018 of $10 million, according to its online annual report, and turned a profit of around $500,000.It’s helped with recruiting interest, according to Dozie, who said he’d marked an increase in candidates inquiring about open positions since the results were posted.

we don’t get considered because investors don’t really think that you can get the results or this performance in the markets that we’re in,” he added — noting that Carbon has operations in Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa and is considering expansion in Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, DRC and Egypt.Investor Lexi Novitske thinks Carbon offering financial performance data is a good thing for Africa’s tech ecosystem. “The move builds trust from clients, partners or investors in a market where there is not a lot of openness,” she said. “I am encouraged to see how other companies will react. My hope is that more will openly report their own metrics…”Dozie says the company will continue to post audited financials on an annual basis, even if they show losses. If the startup continues to expand, attract capital and talent and grow revenues, other Nigerian fintech firms may follow suit.

There is a saying among corporate bankers “You only get credit if you don’t need it”. Translated into business terms: there were underserved customers, ignored by traditional financial industry, who couldn’t apply for a loan or credit. And that helped a lot of fintech startups, the likes of Finiata (Netguru is proud to be a partner here) or Lenddo, to put their foot in the door.

FarmDrive generates real-time credit reports for small farmers, allowing them to access loans from financial institutions and agricultural input providers via mobile phone. 

FarmDrive collects expense and revenue data from farmers via SMS and combines it with satellite imaging, remote sensing technology and alternative data points (e.g., soil analysis, weather forecasts) to create detailed yield estimates and assess credit risk.

The crowdfunding industry has emerged in the past few years as one of the most promising alternative financing options. Lending and donating operations accounted for 81% of the crowdfunding industry's $34.4 billion total funding volume in 2015. Kiva Zip, a prosocial program, created an online platform that provides 0% interest peer-to-peer loans and has features in common with lending and donating crowdfunding platforms.