Nigeria’s CreditCheck Completes $240,000 in Pre-seed Round
A pre-seed funding round for CreditChek, a Nigerian lender, raised $240,000 under the leadership of Atom Capital, with contributions from Aidi Ventures, Ham Serunjogi of Chippercash, Olumide Ogunsanwo of Adamantium Fund, Damola Adegboyega of Assembly Investors, Isaac Ewaleifoh of Launch Africa Ventures, and Ogundiran Kayode.
The company said that with the help of this money, it will be able to realize its goal of building the most trustworthy credit infrastructure in Africa within the next five years.
Kingsley Ibe co-founder used data from the National Bureau of Statistics to demonstrate the importance of CreditCheck in the economy. The statistics showed that in 2018, financial institutions lost more than $4 billion due to persistent loan defaulters.
According to Kenya’s TransUnion credit reference agency, an estimated 3.2 million people—or 6% of the country’s population—have been banned for failing to repay digital credit loans. Customers in Nigeria who borrow money from three to five lenders at once and then vanish into thin air are a common occurrence. Lenders continue to be overrun by these types of bold schemes and a general lack of client willingness to repay debts.
CreditCheck develops powerful identity, credit, and verification services using structured, user-permitted data from a variety of sources. These services enable fintech, banks, microfinance organizations, retail businesses, and mobile money operators to create better financial products for the underserved.
The Nigerian firm debuted its MVP in April 2022 in order to completely minimize the possibility of another “Credit karma for Africa” incident. It accepted 30 firms while it was in beta, handled thousands of API requests, and eventually exited beta in June 2022.
Ibe gained a lot of knowledge through his previous initiatives to create loan credit facilities, particularly MicroMoni. For every 10 loans we disbursed, he claimed, 4 to 6 of them were returned as bad loans, which had a significant impact on our ability to disburse more loans.
CreditChek has introduced three tools to help financial institutions with identity verification and credit evaluation of their clients after identifying the problems.
They provide a no-code platform for conventional, less tech-savvy businesses to employ, and they are straightforward and quick to use so that digital lenders can effortlessly integrate the goods into their applications or websites.
The following are the products:
Income Insight— this feature uses bank-verified historical transactional data to assess the user’s financial status, get key insights on cash flow & ascertain income to determine appropriate financing.
Credit Insight— this feature leverages historical credit data from multiple sources to give key insights into the borrower’s credit and debt status.
Identity— this feature enables businesses to unearth the true identity of their customers by leveraging BVN, NIN and other real-time sources.
Ibe said the company’s vision is to be the most reliable credit infrastructure in Africa in the next 5 years, fostering trust between lenders and borrowers.
Today, the continent is home to more than 500 fintech companies and a lot more traditional loan companies. Many of these companies provide loan and Buy Now Pay Later options, but they lack a solid, dependable platform for client identity and credit verification. This is the void that Creditchek is trying to fill, he said.
