Yvonne Johnson - Afrikan Heroes

Nigeria’s Indicina Raises $3M Seed Round For African Expansion

June 7, 2022

Indicina, a credit agency company, has raised $3 million to fund its African expansion plans. The company, which is already operating in Nigeria and Kenya, says it would also utilize the funds to develop new products for consumer credit recommendations and to strengthen its infrastructure.

Target Global, a pan-European venture capital firm based in Berlin, led the round, adding to its long history of investments in Nigerian businesses like as Kuda, Kippa, and Edukoya. Ricardo Schäefer, a partner of the business, will join Indicina’s board of directors. Greycroft and RV Ventures also participated in this round.

The investors were drawn to Indicina because of its novel approach to addressing Africa’s financial crisis. The company uses data to solve the loan eligibility issue that was previously determined by insufficient creditworthiness ratings.

Yvonne Johnson, Indicina’s co-founder and CEO, stated that the platform now has over 120 customers, including banks, non-bank lenders, and fintech. Polaris Bank, LipaLater, VFD, Zilla, and CreditDirect are a few examples.

“We have been working with the lenders; now we want to involve consumers. So, they see what the lender would see if they are going to apply for a loan,” Johnson said, while stressing the importance of using the funding to get to the next iteration of the company’s machine learning and data play,

She went on to say that the financing would enable Indiana to expand its product development in that area by hiring more data scientists and machine learning engineers.

“We’ve never had any balance sheet. It’s never been about offering credit for us. We want to focus on the infrastructure layer and provide good infrastructure for people to feel more comfortable. We want lenders to be better informed about the decisions around credit so they can go to market faster with their digital products. So, we’ve never had a business model that included our balance sheet, which we’ve always worked with the lenders,” she said.

Indicina credit Indicina credit

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Charles Rapulu Udoh

Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer, who has several years of experience working in Africa’s burgeoning tech startup industry. He has closed multi-million dollar deals bordering on venture capital, private equity, intellectual property (trademark, patent or design, etc.), mergers and acquisitions, in countries such as in the Delaware, New York, UK, Singapore, British Virgin Islands, South Africa, Nigeria etc. He’s also a corporate governance and cross-border data privacy and tax expert.
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Indicina, Nigerian Startup Raises Undisclosed Amount for Product Development

December 11, 2020

One of Nigeria’s leading startups Indicina, which focuses on the development of a data-driven lending platform that digitises the credit value chain, has raised an undisclosed six-figure US dollar funding round as it looks to further build out its product. Indicina which was founded two years ago in 2018 sets out to help both bank and non-bank lenders apply a data-driven approach to credit underwriting at scale, providing new insights into consumers and de-risking unsecured loans.

Indicina Chief executive officer (CEO) Yvonne Johnson

The company equally offers a cloud-based software to digitise the lending business, with its flagship product Originate taking an analytics-driven approach to lending. It empowers clients to unpack the credit value chain and digitise each step, including identity verification, credit decisioning, and disbursements and collections.

It could be recalled that the company had in 2019 raised US$100,000 in capital and recently closed a new, larger six-figure round from investors including Acuity, Kepple, Itanna and Future Africa. Chief executive officer (CEO) Yvonne Johnson told Disrupt Africa the funding would be used mainly for product development, in areas such as engineering and artificial intelligence (AI), as the startup looks to build on already-impressive uptake. The CEO said that Indicina has processed over US$30 million in loan applications covering over 22,000 customers,” adding that “our client base includes lenders as well as SaaS verticals embedding finance within their platforms.”

With Africa’s poor credit infrastructure, only 11 per cent of the continent’s population have their credit information recorded by private credit bureaus and only 17 percent of African banking customers have consumer loans. Johnson said this was a “massive consumer credit opportunity” that required technology and credit risk innovation that most lenders currently do not have. Indicina provides both, with Johnson saying its competitive advantage over other players in the space was its deep understanding of the financial services industry across key emerging markets. Johnson herself previously led the Strategy team at First Bank of Nigeria.

“We understand the business of credit and how technology – specifically end to-end credit journeys – can drive profitability of consumer loan portfolios. Innovation has placed demands on traditional lending business models,” she said.

“How do you expand consumer credit to under-and-unbanked populations in a prudent manner while shortening time-to-decision? Taking a cue from fintechs, leading banks have embraced the digital lending revolution, bringing “time to yes” down to five minutes, and time to cash to less than 24 hours.”

Kelechi Deca

Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry