One Finance Nigeria has announced that it recently secured a $5million internationally-backed debt facility, for Paylater. This facility from New York and Nairobi-based Lendable, will be used to deploy more loans to Paylater customers through a suite of innovative new products. Lendable is a technology enabled funds provider for African consumers and SME lender.
Since its launch in 2016, Paylater has deployed over $60million across 750,000 loans, and approving over 2500 loans in a day with an average of $80 per loan. With this new debt, the company said it will now look to double its size within Nigeria before entering new markets in 2019. Paylater also helps users transfer money, recharge airtime and pay bills.
OneFi was founded in 2012 by Chijioke Dozie, CEO and Ngozi Dozie, the Director. Chijioke said the investment from Lendable is the firm’s first internationally-backed commercial debt transaction, and marks an important stage in the company’s development as it looks to serve the “next billion”.
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“As we transition into a full service digital bank, this financing will allow us to execute on a number of new products. This includes our partnership with Visa, whereby we’ll be providing credit via QR codes at supermarkets, clinics and on public transport in H1 2019,” he said.
Daniel Goldfarb, the CEO of Lendable said “We are incredibly excited to launch this partnership with OneFi, a market leader, as we build our presence in Nigeria. At Lendable, we build financial products to enable lending companies to scale, and we are proud to support OneFi’s mission of providing credit to the under-banked consumer and SME segments in Nigeria. They are an incredible example of a company that has found a product-market fit in a massive market, and are working tirelessly to provide best-in-class service to those customers.”
Lendable is backed by Omidyar Network, KawiSafi Ventures, the Dutch Development Bank (FMO) and other leading institutions provides credit facilities to consumers and SMEs credit providers operating in pay-as-you-go services. The investment in OneFi marks the first Nigerian deal Lendable has signed which promises a handful of new Nigerian clients for the company.
