Nigerian Ethical Credit Fintech BFREE raises $1.7m to expand into emerging markets

BFree, an ethical credit Fintech startup, announced that it has raised $1.7 million to expand into emerging markets globally. Participants in this pre-Series A round include 4Di Capital, Octerra Capital, VestedWorld, Voltron Capital, Logos Ventures, and several other angel investors.

Coupled with $800,000 raised in a seed round in May 2020, this new raise brings total funds raised to $2.5 million.

Founded in the summer of 2020 by Chukwudi Enyi, Moses Nmor, and Julian Flosbach, BFREE’s solution aims to incentivise consumers that have fallen behind on their credit repayments to sustainably clear their balances by deploying a combination of self-servicing solutions, communication automation, and human operations, supported by machine learning algorithms that cluster and predict customer behaviour.

BFree is working to enter into emerging markets globally. Already present in Nigeria and Kenya, it is aggressively setting up operations and recruiting in 16 new markets including Ghana, India, Uganda, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Russia, Poland, Pakistan and Indonesia.

According to Bfree co-founder and CEO, Julian Flosbach in a discussion with TechCrunch, “We are going into markets with large populations, credit deepening and an underdeveloped regulatory environment, where a behavioral collection approach is likely to work.”

BFree says it is currently working with 30 credit institutions, including digital lenders, micro-finance institutions and banks. The startup uses customer data provided by the lenders to build the user profiles of defaulters, and runs their data through an algorithm to predict their behavior and recommend the best collection method.

Bfree claims it has so far followed up with 1.1 million defaulters to date, and are currently handling around 800,000 customers, majority of them in Nigeria. It expects it will be handling 1.4 million profiles by the end of February 2022.