NowNow Secures $13 Million in Seed Funding to Promote Pan-African Expansion

Only 33% of persons worldwide are financially literate, indicating a poor level of financial literacy worldwide.

The percentage of adults who are financially literate in African nations ranges between 26% (Nigeria) and 42%, according to Standard & Poor’s Global Financial Literacy Survey (South Africa).

Comparing the percentage to that of Europe, where it is between 65% and 75%, and the United States, where it is 57%, implies that African people may have a harder time building and maintaining wealth than their Western counterparts.

According to a Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) research on financial literacy, the majority of persons in Nigeria wish to comprehend fundamental financial concepts so they can make educated decisions about saving, investing, and borrowing.

A Nigerian fintech company, NowNow Digital Systems, has secured $13 million in a seed round to increase financial inclusion throughout Africa by offering financial services to the continent’s unbanked and underbanked population. According to the business, the money will enable it to launch new products that will further improve its current consumer banking, agency banking, and merchant payment solutions.

The business has also teamed up with the Sustainable Inclusive Digital Financial Services (SIDFS), a research and advocacy initiative run by the Lagos Business School, to launch a financial education and literacy program that aims to advance financial inclusion in Nigeria. NowNow intends to make use of SIDFS’s extensive data, library materials, and resources to offer its consumers financial and digital literacy tools that will enable wise financial planning.

Sahir Berry and Mahesh Nair, the company’s founders, told TechCabal that NowNow stands apart from rivals like Kuda and TeamApt because of its proprietary infrastructure on its open API network and because other financial institutions also utilize it to gain access to various local and global markets.

The founders claim that NowNow operates in both the B2C and B2B sectors, providing agency banking to consumers and small businesses as well as its platform-as-a-service to businesses.

The business asserts that it has more than 50,000 agents in Nigeria who assist clients with money transfers, bill payments, and airtime purchases. Additionally, customers can use the company’s app to access services like insurance, loans, and a wallet on their own.

NowNow has a balanced approach of agency banking, value-added services to the mass consumer and SME market, PAAS to our enterprise customers, and a strong technical infrastructure of modular monetizable fintech solutions, according to the founders. In contrast, many fintechs are dependent on a commodity-based agency banking model.

NeoVision Ventures Ltd., DLF Family Office, and Shadi Abdulhadi took the lead in the funding round. The creators claim that these investors comprehended NowNow’s business concept, the African market, and what is necessary to maintain growth in a difficult market. The Mastercard Start Path Global initiative, designed to aid later-stage businesses in innovating and growing, just picked the financial platform to take part.

The company intends to use the funds to develop more digital financial inclusion solutions and to expand its services throughout Africa to Liberia, Equatorial Guinea, and Angola, where the financial literacy rate is 15%.