Andrew Watkins-Ball, Founder & Group CEO, said this milestone demonstrates JUMO’s unique ability to reach underserved entrepreneurs – over 60% of JUMO’s customers are micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs).

“We are working to connect every entrepreneur to the financial products they need to grow and prosper,” says Watkins-Ball. “Our technology enables our partner banks and payments companies to help millions of underserved people access financial services.”

The startup will use the proceeds from the funding to expand into new markets and launch new products. Jumo is targeting entrepreneurs in emerging markets — and plans to offer next-generation savings, lending and insurance products to them. 

The startup currently operates in five African countries — Kenya, Ghana, Uganda, Zambia and Tanzania. It closely works with financial firms and telecoms to provide its services, media reports said. 

JUMO is a full technology platform, developed for building and running financial services

JUMO’s extensive network of partners includes financial services providers such as the Barclays Africa Group, Letshego Bank, and Telenor Microfinance Bank, as well as mobile network operators such as MTN, Airtel, Telenor, and Tigo.

African fintech startup Jumo has pulled in a fresh $12.5 million to add more fuel for its expansion into Asia Pacific.

Jumo specializes in social impact financial products, such as microloans, savings and insurance.

Since its founding in 2014, JUMO, which helps individuals and small businesses access savings and credit products through their mobile devices, has mainly focused on Africa where the adoption of mobile money has transformed the banking landscape.

More than 9 million people have saved or borrowed using JUMO technology since it was launched in 2014. The platform has originated over $700 million in loans and manages over 25 million customer interactions per month, the company said.

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.

JUMO currently partners with financial service providers and mobile network operators to provide credit and savings solutions in Pakistan, Ghana, Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya and Zambia.

The International Finance Corporation (IFC) estimates that 40% of small and micro enterprises in the formal sector in developing countries have an unmet financing need of $5.2-trillion every year.

JUMO is a transaction and predictive technology platform that partners with mobile network operators and banks to offer customers microloans and access to savings and insurance products. They are currently active in six markets – Ghana, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Zambia and Pakistan – with plans to soon launch in India, Bangladesh, Côte d’Ivoire and Nigeria. JUMO has helped disburse over $1.6 billion in funding to small and micro enterprises, and has helped connect over 15 million people to credit and savings services.

This is a good example of a service whose time had come and whose implementation occurred in the right context.

Safaricom PLC and Ant Financial Services – the world’s largest fintech services provider – have announced a partnership that will allow Kenyans shopping on AliExpress to pay for their purchases using M-PESA.

M-Pesa is a Kenyan mobile payments platform, one of the first of its kind in Africa (

he service has been a runaway success since launching in 2007, operating in 10 countries across Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia and earning Safaricom 19.4 billion shillings (about $190 million) in the first half of 2015. It seems likely that as cell phone use continues to proliferate on the African continent, M-Pesa's transactions will grow, too.

M-Pesa is specifically designed to benefit customers who have no access to banks - either because they do not have a bank account or because they live too far away from a bank branch. Each transaction is made with a mobile handset, enabling our customers to send money from any location.

The company is collaborating on a new service to enable Kenyan customers seamlessly transfer money between PayPal and Safaricom’s M-Pesa mobile wallets.

Revenues from the global mobile financial service M-Pesa have recovered following the reinstatement of fees on person-to-person transactions on the platform.

Vodacom says revenue from the international M-Pesa business, excluding Kenya, rose 10 per cent to Sh8.5 billion in the quarter ended December compared to Sh7.7 billion a year earlier.

In Kenya, mobile money is almost synonymous with Safaricom’s M-Pesa.

When Kenya’s leading telco Safaricom introduced M-Pesa in 2007, it started out as a simple transfer service that allowed users to send and receive money with their mobile phones. Safaricom has since rolled out other M-Pesa services like loans and payments.

M-PESA is the result of a partnership between Vodafone and Safaricom, a Kenyan mobile network operator. M-PESA's International Money Transfer (IMT) service allows anyone wishing to send money to Kenya to visit one of several Safaricom IMT partners (such as Post Finance, World Remit, and Western Union) and send money to an M-PESA mobile phone in Kenya.

M-PESA”: that is a name in global fintech history that can never be erased. Not that anybody would want to. Forever it will be the perfect example of a viable financial ecosystem based on rules unthinkable before

When M-Pesa (launched by Safaricom) made its debut a few years later, it had initially been conceived as a solution for microfinancing — allowing institutions to distribute and collect loan payments without the hassle of cash. However, during this pilot, its widespread adoption in a myriad of alternative use cases caused the company to reconsider and relaunch with a focus on ensuring individuals could send money to their families and execute payments.

Recognizing the need to continue providing our customers with innovative payment options, we worked closely with MasterCard to offer cardholders a new and convenient method for bill payments,” said Ashraf Sabry, CEO, Fawry