Tunde Kehinde and Ercin Eksin, cofounders of online Logistics company Africa Courier Express (ACE), are coming out with another startup, an online financial services company, named Lidya.
Touted as a digital bank without branches, Lidya will offer small and medium-sized businesses unsecured loans of between $500 and $15,000. According to Tunde, while it will initially focus on Nigerian customers, Lidya will target cities across Africa.
In a telephone conversation with Bloomberg, Tunde Kehinde states that “There are no real products catered to these customers today. What we’re trying to do is introduce a lot of technology, algorithms and machine learning to industrialize the credit assessment process.”
Tunde and Ercin are currently the majority owners of Lidya but they hope to bring in other shareholders and raise more than $1 million in the next few months from investors, primarily in the U.S. Lidya says it will partner with Nigerian banks to allow them to use it as a platform to target small businesses.
“Because of how the banks are set up, with bricks and mortar networks, they’re more inclined to service multinationals and large government institutions,” Kehinde said. “Their cost structure isn’t favourable to servicing small businesses. Because we’re using technology and algorithms to assess the risk, it allows them to offer financial products to these customers at a low cost.”
Lidya is scheduled to open for business in October 2016
