Herconomy Rebrands Into a Fintech Startup, Introduces new Offerings for African Women

The pre-seed raise by Herconomy will go down in history. The startup’s funding story rocked the tech industry last year.

The community-based startup raised $600,000 in funding within 24 hours of Ife Durosimi-Instagram Etti’s post in order to scale its SaaS solution, which provided women with ongoing access to career prospects and discounts from selected retailers. Herconomy is currently making another significant move by changing its business model and product to become a fintech startup.

The founder of Herconomy, Durosimi-Etti, is accustomed to change. She moved from corporate communications at Nigerian Breweries to running a furniture business over the course of the last three years before putting her working gloves on where her heart is—a startup that promotes the success of women.

The previous product from Herconomy accomplished a number of noteworthy milestones, including uniting a thriving community of women and providing them with access to jobs, opportunities, and capacity-building seminars. Customers paying to use these benefits was the foundation of their business strategy.

But Durosimi-Etti has bigger plans for the firm than just connecting women to opportunities. She has always hoped that Herconomy will serve as a catalyst for women’s socioeconomic independence by actively assisting them in increasing their wealth, managing their money, and gaining access to capital for their enterprises.

Only 33% of women in Nigeria have bank accounts, which keeps them out of the realm of digital services and wealth-generating potential. Durosimi-Etti believes Herconomy has what it takes to meet the great task of banking the unbanked.

A mobile savings software that enables women to save and earn up to 10% yearly interest has been released by the community-turned-fintech Herconomy.

“Save, Earn, Learn, Connect and Thrive” is the motto of Herconomy. According to the business, women’s first step toward financial security and asset management is saving. This conviction in the ability of a saving culture to change lives may have resulted from the positive feedback and successes of a number of saving challenges that the community ran internally over the years. At least 500 women took part in Herconomy’s saving challenges prior to the release of this app, contributing far over $100,000 in total. According to Herconomy, the app, which underwent a trial in April 2022, already has roughly 5,000 active savers.

At a media discussion to which TechCabal was invited, Lasisi, the CTO of Herconomy, discussed the goal and effects of the pivot. She said: “Our mission is to empower women in Nigeria and beyond to become financially independent, thereby contributing to the socio-economic development of their ecosystem. This is consistent with our goal of empowering one million women by 2025. Herconomy has started the Each Woman Bring One campaign to help realize this goal. Through the campaign, women are monetarily rewarded for convincing at least one person in their social network to download the Herconomy mobile app and begin saving.

An essential component of Herconomy’s ambitious ambition is this new savings app. The two primary saving plans offered by the savings product are Vault and Float, which offer interest rates of 10% and 8% annually, respectively. Friends can check in on one another while saving for a goal with the Accountability Partner tool. Additionally, the app offers a Save as You Spend function that allows users to place orders and receive discounts of roughly 30% on a selection of goods and services.

Herconomy is still actively involved in its vast community play despite this shift to fintech. Herconomy will include its savings app users in the activities of its 6000-member community, unlike most fintech products.

Users will receive push notifications for networking opportunities, knowledge-sharing gatherings, and business expansion options that could increase their earning potential and increase their savings. Additionally, they will have access to Herconomy’s weekly online meetings, where experts are invited to speak on a variety of topics that concern women, from financial literacy to reproductive health. Herconomy will continue to be community- and women-driven. Men are not prohibited from participating in these activities or from using the savings app, but the startup will prioritize women when making decisions and evaluating its success.

When discussing the difficulties the business encountered while developing this product, Durosimi-Etti emphasized the difficulty in hiring qualified personnel.

Finding the proper talent proved to be a challenge in and of itself as thousands of Nigerian talent took distant jobs or moved to the diaspora to work. Nevertheless, she has been able to assemble a team of 31, more than half of them are women. The business takes pride in how the gender balance of its personnel represents the society for which Herconomy strives—a future in which women are given the same opportunities as men.

Herconomy presently collaborates with Providus Bank, and AXA Mansard insurance firm secures and insures the money of its clients. Herconomy intends to push past its cooperative license in the coming months to obtain a microfinance bank (MFB) license, allowing it to further its primary financial inclusion mission.

Herconomy intends to use its extensive agent network to open tier 1 accounts for unbanked women (those without bank verification numbers) and assist them in gaining access to all the benefits of the Herconomy app. One of the company’s main goals is to give credit to clients. According to the company’s associate product manager, Opral Ogbuigwe, Herconomy will begin giving credit in 2023.

Herconomy is putting its money on women with this venture and demonstrating that, even in Nigeria’s most crowded digital industry, startups with social capital can stand out and have an impact with their revolutionary technology.