Umba
Umba’s goal is to make banking free across Africa, empowering our customers to control their financial lives. Our mission is not complete until financial services are affordable, efficient, and widely available.
We offer frictionless banking services as a customer acquisition tool to propel growth and learn from customers’ financial behavioral patterns to train our state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms to predict credit risk. With this model, we offer credit and non-credit products to our customers.
Creating broad access to credit in markets with limited availability can lead to explosive growth. This strategy has been championed by companies like Nubank who have leveraged a credit-led approach to acquire 35 million customers and become one of the largest banks in LatAm.
We are building a sticky ecosystem of banking products that learn from each other to provide our users with tailored financial services. The resulting data network effects are a deep moat against the competition.
Key Achievements
As of today, we have built these foundational banking services:
- A checking account with an account number that users can use to receive money
- An in-network peer-to-peer payment service in which users can send and request funds from each other
- An out-of-network money transfer system through which users can send money to non-Umba users and entities like their local taxi cab, grocery store, or restaurant
- A one-stop shop for all traditional bills like utilities, television, and airtime
- A digital lending service that analyzes a user’s transaction history & financial data to provide instant credit
- We launched savings accounts
- We cleared a lot of regulatory hurdles in our Kenyan bank acquisition and are now awaiting the official announcement
Testimonial
Chandaria Capital has significantly impacted Umba´s growth; the capital invested has helped Umba solidify as a Neobank in Africa, working through the primary goal of becoming the #1 Pan-African digital bank.
Chandaria greatly understands the African Fintech environment; they have asked questions that challenge how we used to do things and helped us think about the obstacles we are facing in different areas.
Chandaria’s weight as a key investor in Africa’s next big thing and their network have been incredibly helpful in positioning Umba in the African Fintech ecosystem and increasing Umba’s credibility in Kenya and Nigeria. Chandarias’ support helps Umba bring digital transformation and financial inclusion to these countries.
Founders: Barry O’Mahony, Tiernan Kennedy
Year Founded: 2021
HQ: Nigeria