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Funding Pula: Insuretech Startup Closes $6M Series A Funding to Scale Up Business Across Africa 0 SharesShareTweetSharePin The African Insuretech service provider, Pula, has recently closed a US$6 million Series A funding round led by TLcom Capital and had participation from Women’s World Banking. It specializes in digital as well as agric insurance to derisk smallholder farmers across Africa. This new round of investment to the insuretech startup will be used to scale up operations in the company’s existing 13 markets across Africa. Pula has so far impacted over 4.3 million farmers on the continent and the new funding will help push its expansion into Asia to power resilience and profitability for Asian smallholder farmers. Pula was launched by Rose Goslinga and Thomas Njeru in 2015, to design and deliver innovative agricultural insurance and digital products to help smallholders farmers improve their farming practices, endure climate risks and bolster their incomes. This has become necessary because for smallholder farmers in emerging markets, the traditional method of calculating insurance through farm visits is often expensive, meaning they are often neglected from financial protection against climate risks.

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.

As technology gives new entrants better and cheaper ways to compete for core banking business, banks’ dominant position could be challenged.

Cloud computing The banking, payment and insurance industries rely heavily on the outsourcing of various operational processes to cloud computing service providers (eg, Amazon, Google and Microsoft). The increasing reliance of the European financial sector on foreign entities has recently given French and European regulators cause for concern. In 2017, the European Banking Authority (EBA) published its "Recommendations on Outsourcing to Cloud Service Providers. These recommendations were later included in the update of the EBA Guidelines on Outsourcing Arrangements (EBA/GL/2019/02), which are fully implemented at the national level by the Prudential Supervision and Resolution Authority (ACPR). The EBA guidelines require banking and financial institutions to enter into written agreements with their service providers (including cloud service providers). These agreements should notably include provisions detailing the reporting obligations of the service provider and the audit rights of the competent authorities. In practice, the main cloud service providers are reluctant to enter into agreements which comply with the requirements of the EBA guidelines. This has prompted French and European banking and financial institutions to report these issues to their regulators. This review could lead to the drafting of a European regulation or directive determining standard contractual provisions which would be mandatorily included in agreements with cloud service providers.

By using virtual cards and wallets for online payments, you can: • Meet customer expectations by delivering an innovative product that they need • Encourage immediate card use to drive the profitability of your programme • Enhance the customer and user experience through convenient features • Strengthen your brand amongst your customers

AgroCenta brings the shareholders in Ghana’s agricultural value chain under one umbrella. Focusing on the producers, rural smallholder farmers, the company has developed a web and mobile platform that provides rural farmers with a suite of services to empower them to sell their crops at fair-market prices. AgroCenta’s platform, which is includes SMS functionality, provides the following services: 1) AgroInfo: real-time commodity pricing information; 2) TruckR: an on-demand logistics solution; 3) AgroTrade: a market platform to offer crops for sale; and 4) AgroPay: a mobile-money based payments service. The company markets its platform leveraging an intimate knowledge of the African cultural context and recruiting and technologically empowering village chiefs to act as advocates or agents for the platform.

Fawry for Banking & Payment Technology Services SAE, an Egyptian digital payments provider, was listed on Cairo’s exchange about a year back. The company recently experienced a 300% increase in its market value to 20 billion Egyptian pounds (appr. $1.3 billion). The payments firm confirmed that its valuation has grown 4x since the COVID-19 outbreak in late February 2020. As first reported by Bloomberg, Fawry is now ranked among Egypt’s 10 most valuable firms, which include Telecom Egypt Co. and Elswedy Electric Co. However, these businesses are generating a lot more revenue compared to Fawry for now. Many locals in Egypt are still settling transactions with cash payments, despite the Coronavirus crisis which has made it unsafe to handle paper currency notes. However, the nation’s reserve bank has asked lending platforms and other financial service providers to encourage residents to make digital payments via mobile wallets. The central bank also wants Egyptians to use online payment platforms like Fawry in order to limit physical contact, so that the virus doesn’t spread further.

Fawry saw a record surge in stock price during the first two months after their initial debut. The price then flattened until March – where it dropped to a record low of EGP 7 per share. As COVID-19 took center stage, the price shot up to its record high.

Less than six months after becoming the first billion-dollar technology company in Egypt, Fawry has hit another milestone by surpassing the $2 billion market cap for the first time. Its stock has doubled in the last six months and closed at an all-time high of EGP 46.90 today, pushing its market cap to over EGP 32 billion. This makes it the fourth most valuable company listed on The Egyptian Exchange (EGX) and it seems that it’s only a matter of days before it takes the second position. The Egyptian payments firm had gone public in August 2020 by listing its shares on EGX at the price of EGP 6.46 per share. The share price has surged over 7x after company’s public market debut about eigtheen months ago.

Consumers continue to use Google Search and YouTube for inspiration and learning new skills, and ‘how to’ searches continue to grow across both platforms.

APIs are the core of every digital strategy Digital transformation has made it possible to scale up things that used to be difficult to expand. Partnering, integrating, or reselling used to require hard work by everyone involved. As a result of digital transformation, an increasing share of business processes is digital so these things can be done far more quickly and more efficiently. 

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step! After twelve years of the startup journey, Cairo-headquartered fintech company Fawry has reached a unicorn status (that is, now worth over a billion dollar!), the first ever by any fintech startup in Egypt and the first ever by any African tech startup going through an IPO (Initial Public Offering) on African soil. Jumia, the Africa-focused ecommerce startup did this in 2019, but that was on the New York Stock Exchange. Interswitch, the Nigerian payment company, also did it last year, but it needed extra funding from VISA to make that happen. 

Lagos, Nigeria – Leading digital financial services company, Carbon, has released it’s 2019 financial statements audited by KPMG, detailing its product growth and $17.5mm in revenue.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.Formerly called Paylater, Carbon pioneered instant lending in Nigeria and was the first mobile app to provide access to credit digitally and without requesting individuals to present the documents and collateral traditionally associated with accessing loans. Earlier this year, Carbon introduced its iOS app and USSD (*1303#) service. It also announced its Disrupt Fund, a $100,000 Pan-African fund to address the lack of capital for African tech startups.“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.So far this year, Carbon has introduced multiple new features for its customer base including Carbon Express: a keyboard allowing users to make payments from any social app, periodic investments, free bank transfers, monthly wallet interest, and more.Carbon also plans to introduce debit cards, a reward program for loyal customers and SME accounts for entrepreneurs, in the months to come.You can find the full annual report here (https://bit.ly/2YNuvPw).About Carbon: Carbon (https://getCarbon.co) is a pan-African digital financial institution accessible via smartphones and which provides individuals with access to credit, a fee-free/interest-earning wallet, simple payments solutions, high-yield investment opportunities and easy-to-use tools for personal financial management.Our mission is to empower opportunity globally through friction-free finance that empowers individuals and businesses. We are a global company of over 100 employees with operations in Nigeria, England and Kenya.

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.

Egypt-based financial technology (fintech) company Fawry has played a pivotal role in providing digital payment capabilities to businesses and consumers alike in the country. Last year, the company went public on the Egyptian Exchange, a feat realised by few startups in the Middle East. Now, Fawry’s co-founder Mohamed Okasha has stepped down as the company’s managing director to launch his own fintech fund, Disruptech, with a target size of $25 million.  We spoke with Okasha about the fund and why he decided to launch it.