Nigerian Fintech Fairmoney Gets Banking License, Raises $42 million Series B Round

Nigerian fintech Fairmoney announced it has secured a Microfinance bank (MfB) licence from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), along with $42 million in funding.

Launched in 2017 by Laurin Hainy, Matthieu Gendreau, and Nicolas Berthozat, FairMoney is a mobile bank for emerging markets. It started as a mobile app that uses alternative smartphone data to underwrite microcredit in Nigeria. 

According to Laurin Hainy in a discussion with Techcrunch, “this micro-finance license now enables us to open current accounts for our users, and we’re doing that on quite a big scale.” 

The funding round was led by the US hedge fund and investment firm, Tiger Global. Existing investors that participated in the round include DST Partners, Flourish Ventures, Newfund and Speedinvest.

FairMoney, like many other Nigerian fintechs, started out in the lending business and is about completing its evolution into being a full-fledged digital bank.

With an active presence in Nigeria and India, the startup plans to diversify its current offerings and expand to become the preferred financial destination for its users.

In 2019, the company closed a 10 million Euro Series A round of investment led by Flourish, a venture of The Omidyar Group, the partners of DST Global, and existing seed investors Newfund, Speedinvest, and Le Studio VC.

Since its launch, the company has grown its user base to about 3.5 million registered users which includes 1.3 million unique bank account holders.

Last year, Fairmoney reported that it disbursed a total loan volume of $93 million to over 1.3 million users who made more than 6.5 million loan applications.

This year, the company is looking to disburse $300 million worth of loans.