Why this Nigerian fintech startup is volunteering audited financials

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.

Nigerian fintech startup Carbon has set up a US$100,000 pan-African fund to address the lack of funding and support holding back entrepreneurs on the continent.

Consumer lending platform Carbon, which rebranded in April as parent company OneFi continues to transition into being a full digital banking platform after raising US$5 million in debt funding and acquiring Nigerian payments startup Amplify, has been busy expanding its offering, and has also moved into new markets with a Kenyan launch

Carbon expects the initiative to spark more collaboration and further investment that should drive growth across the ecosystem, and is accepting applications from companies with operations in Uganda, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Egypt. 

Leading digital financial services company Carbon from Nigeria posted all-time high growth last year

Carbon began operations in 2012 and within the space of six years, it grew revenue steadily, reaching an all-time high of $17.5mm in full-year 2019. In the same year, Carbon expanded its product offerings to the Kenyan market and it’s disbursement volumes have grown from N13bn (2018) to N23bn.

“The company will continue to share it’s audited financials annually, thus upholding a culture of transparency and accountability,” says Ngozi Dozie, Founder of Carbon.

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Nigerian digital bank Carbon hit $240M in payments processed last year, up 89% from 2019

In 2018, Carbon, a Nigerian fintech startup, made its financials public for the first time. Although typical for foreign private startups, it’s almost an anomaly in Africa. There have been rare cases in the past, for instance, when Rocket Internet had to include Jumia’s financials in its yearly reports after going public. At the time, the German investment outfit was a founding shareholder in the African-based unicorn.

A $15.8 million VC-backed company, Carbon was founded by Chijioke Dozie and Ngozi Dozie in 2012. The brothers started the company in a niche digital lending market, but now, the company offers a plethora of services from savings to payments and investments.

In an audited report published this week, Carbon, the Nigerian fintech company, declared that it made the naira equivalent of $312,905 in profit after tax in 2019. 

Carbon reveals the appeal of fintech transparency in second profitable year, with $17million in revenue

Carbon offered 975,000 loans valued at $64.1million in 2019. The average loan offered to borrowers is $65.8 which, according to CEO Chijioke Dozie, is at the same level from 2018. A larger income tax bill ate into the company’s 2019 balance, reducing net profit by 23.5%

Omidyar Network will match up to $2 million of online donations from individual Kiva lenders. Amy Klement, Vice President, Investments at Omidyar Network, will join Kiva’s board of directors.

Kiva will use the funding to further develop its technology platform, expand its network of field partners, and continue to invest in due diligence and monitoring capabilities across its growing portfolio. The commitment, which marks the largest grant in Kiva’s history, reflects Omidyar Network’s focus on bringing microfinance to underserved markets as well as catalyzing social impact through technology.

"Our commitment of up to $1 million in funding to address the growing wealth inequality in the United States is not only the right thing to do, but a necessity,"

Kiva's crowdfunding platform, Kiva.org, allows individuals to lend as little as $25 to make a difference in someone's life. Kiva Protocol aims to establish financial identity and credit history for unbanked populations using distributed ledger technology (DLT), with its inaugural project currently being implemented in Sierra Leone.

The club’s decade-long KIVA lending portfolio exceeded $83,000 last week. KIVA is a micro-lending organization. Of the total loan value of $83,150, about $12,000 has been collected via loose change cups at meetings; the rest is comprised of paybacks, with interest.

All but one of the seven loans – typically of $100 each – were made to individual entrepreneurs in construction. To date, the club has made 849 loans in 72 countries. Just under half of the loans have been made to agricultural endeavors, another 20 percent to manufactures and construction, followed by food production. Fifty-five percent of the recipients have been women. 

Kiva, a nonprofit founded in 2005, has chosen to make Waco a “Kiva Hub,” the first city in Texas to receive such a designation

He welcomed small business needing a loan up to $15,000 to contact Startup Waco, headquartered at 605 Austin Ave.

The Waco City Council gave the local Kiva Hub a financial kick-start, awarding it a $50,000 grant. Passavant said he hopes to approach individuals and foundations about putting additional money behind Kiva.

You’ve probably heard of Kiva, but if you aren’t among the 1.7 million people who have made loans on the platform, you may not really know what it is. This crowdfunding platform is, in effect, a bank funded by people who lend their money with an expectation of losing only a little, to 2.9 million people who stand to gain a lot.

Today, Kluge serves as an advisor on Kiva’s leadership council. Kiva’s senior investment manager for refugees and displaced populations, Lev Plaves, serves on the steering committee for the Refugee Investment Network.

The fund provided $5 million in loans to more than 8,000 refugees and yielded something that is almost invaluable: data. The fund proved that refugees are just as likely as most—and more likely than some—to repay their loans, making way for more loans and economic support for this particularly vulnerable population.

Kiva is the slickest of the microfunding websites, offering a mind-bogglingly glossy catalogue of projects sorted into different categories, countries and attributes, all illustrated with backstories and pictures.

Kiva is often already in the borrower’s pocket, lent by a local MFI long before the loan target has been met. There are good practical reasons for this, explains Kathy Guis,

Kiva is using blockchain technology in Sierra Leone to create an online ID database so that loan applicants outside the formal banking system can prove their credit history, and it hopes to extend the system to other countries if successful.

Today, we’re proud to introduce a new look and feel for Kiva, and a new, mobile-responsive website that makes supporting small businesses around the world easier than ever.

When Kiva began in 2005, we had a simple goal: to connect borrowers who need small amounts of capital to improve their lives, with lenders who want to help.

Kiva’s grown into a true global community, where people come together to support and believe in each other. That's part of the story we hope to capture with our new imagery.

Kiva has been awarded $2.5 million from the W-GDP Fund at USAID in an effort to identify innovative approaches to catalyze commercial investment for women’s economic empowerment and equality.

The Kiva Capital team will use this innovative funding to launch a comprehensive fund design and structuring process. This will include the development of an impact framework and a shared learnings platform.

Kiva has promoted itself as a link between individual lenders in the developed world and individual borrowers in the developing world, allowing visitors to its Web site to learn about and lend money to people in poor nations seeking small loans for specific purposes.

the loans made by individual lenders through the Kiva site do not actually end up in the pockets of individual borrowers. Instead, those loans are aggregated and used to backstop microfinance institutions that have already paid out microloans to the borrowers featured on the site.

Kiva president Premal Shah said he could foresee a day when Kiva really did provide a direct person-to-person connection, once certain legal hurdles are cleared and as more individuals in the developing world began using mobile phones to access credit and make electronic payments. In the meantime, the organization has changed the wording on its homepage from "Kiva lets you lend to a specific entrepreneur, empowering them to lift themselves out of poverty" to "Kiva connects people through lending to alleviate poverty."

100% of your loans go to the field Kiva never takes a fee from lenders, which means 100% of the funds you lend on Kiva go toward supporting borrowers’ loans.

Kiva Microfunds is based in California and registered as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. All donations made to Kiva go to support Kiva Microfunds and are used to cover the operating costs of running Kiva.

“Fawry” took over “Waffarha” shares | Fawry

Fawry, Egypt’s first and largest E-payment company in the Egyptian market signed an agreement to acquire a non-controlling interest in “Waffarha” is a platform that provides various offers and discount vouchers for B2B and B2C through its website and APPs on mobile devices.

Tarek Magdy, CEO of Waffarha, said: “Waffarha” was launched 6 years ago as the only platform that provides offers ranging from 50% for B2B and B2C, with more than 1 million social media followers and more than 1000 commercial series.”

In the framework of its concern in making it easy for citizens to pay for accessing its e-services via the Internet, in order to reach a society more dependent on electronic payments; WATCH iT! has announced signing a partnership agreement with Fawry the leading Fintech network in Egypt to offer its services through “Fawry Pay” to the public.

Mohamed Okasha, Managing Director of Fawry, said that the partnership with WATCH iT! is the result of a joint cooperation to provide outstanding services to customers, highlighting that “Fawry Pay” payment methods include payment either cash through any of Fawry outlets or online using credit cards (MizaCard, MasterCard and Visa) in addition to bank channels linked to Fawry’s network (ATM, Internet banking, mobile wallets) and also through “myFawry” application available for smart phones.

How it works?

Upon successful purchase the bank locks customer’s credit limit at the full amount, and within 1 working day after receiving the daily reports from Fawry, the bank will convert the transaction into installment plan and only charges the customer the monthly payment with/without interest depends on program type.