Sharing financial data via APIs and data-driven value-added product analysis in Africa is becoming increasingly attractive as large enterprises continue to raise more money for expansion.
In less than twelve months after it secured $3 million in initial round financing, the San Francisco and African Startup has raised another $15 million for its financial data infrastructure business. The company also describes itself as a machine learning platform and service.
Octopus Ventures topped the Series A round with follow-up investments from Lateral Capital, EchoVC and Raptor Group. Other investors were also involved, including Unshackled Ventures, Future Africa and Two Small Fish Ventures. Pngme also accepted checks from business angels. Some of them are Hayden Simmons from RallyCap, Dan Kahn from Plaid, Richard Talbot from RBC Capital and Kyle Ellicott from Intersect VC.
The Pngme platform serves Fintech and other financial institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa. It currently offers three main products to customers in Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa. In addition to the well-known mobile APIs and SDKs, Pngme has added a client management platform. The combination of the three products will drive the adoption and use of personalised consumer experiences and financial products by the company, the company said.
In a statement to TechCrunch, Co-founder, Brendan Playford mentioned building personalised user fintech experiences that Alipay and WeChat have been doing for years. While users are registering, both platforms give the correct recommendation on every financial service before offering you the right product when making a decision.
Playford says, “It’s a highly data-driven user experience. And every fintech or bank wants to provide that same data-driven user experience. From instant loans or savings, or overdrafts, or whatever it might be, it’s all just like a user experience around a product.”
Still talking about Alipay and WeChat, he noted that if you get to the core of all of the business problems for financial institutions, they’re looking at doing two things. “One is they’re looking at lowering their customer acquisition costs. And then they’re looking at increasing the lifetime value of their customers,” he added.
Playford said his company wants to follow suite by mirroring this model. But why did it suddenly become so important for the company?
Financial institutions and Fintech companies in Africa compete to provide fully personalised consumer experiences and financial products tailored to the needs of their clients. You need a data infrastructure to promote this product and interact with the user. It is believed that machine learning models need to be trained in order to capture, preserve and maximise the value of customers’ lives.
This process can be expensive and time consuming and leaves you with the difficult task of deciding between building the infrastructure or serving your customers.
Pngme enables financial institutions and Fintech companies to collect and summarize extensive financial data. The company says the mobile SDK and its data processing channels collect alternative financial data and combine it with other data sources to create a complete picture of a person’s financial behavior.
Pngme’s Series A closed at a total investment of $18.5 million, making it the best-funded company in this fintech category across the continent. Other notable startups are South African Stitch and Nigerian Okra, Mono and OnePipe.
While each platform has evolved into more complex data offerings, Playford clearly sets one of the key points that Pngme has considered since February to these other platforms. The explanation by Playford on why he thinks Pngme is different aligns with how other founders think about their own platforms. But time will tell how long these products can differ.
Pngme’s proposals were drawn to several unnamed first-tier banks in Nigeria and South Africa; Fintechs Kuda, Umba, Renmoney, CredPal and credit bureaus such as TransUnion Africa.
The African Startup will use the investment to win more customers, it said. It intends to achieve this by expanding its management team, among other things. Pngme wants to employ Lorraine Kageni Maina as the company’s CSO and Nick Masson as CTO.
