Nigerian fintech startup BFREE secures funding 

Lagos-based fintech startup BFREE has secured an undisclosed amount of funding in a seed round led by Nigeria-based Beta.Ventures alongside Launch Africa Ventures and GreenHouse Capital. 

BFREE secures undisclosed amount of funding

Ike Eze, of Beta Ventures, attributes the investment into the fintech startup to its social impact feature that assists individuals in managing their existing debt and becoming financially stable. 

“We are really excited to help grow the first ethical credit management company on the continent. Efficient and user-friendly credit collection is an essential part of the credit value chain. BFREE is essential for the existing credit market, and it opens the door for significant credit deepening in Africa and any other emerging market. The team is highly experienced in lending and is now solving a problem that they once faced themselves, which is something that we like a lot in founders.” 

BFREE

Founded in 2020 by Chukwudi Enyi, Moses Nmor, and Julian Flosbach, the fintech aims to improve consumers’ financial health through its tech-enabled credit management solution that makes collection processes more scalable, efficient, and user-friendly. 

Julian Flosbach, CEO of BFREE provides insight into the fintech’s strategy and ambition.

“Inefficiency and lack of transparency of collections are not unique challenges to digital lenders and also not peculiar to Nigeria. We see significant use cases among other customer verticals with digital products such as commercial and microfinance banks, embedded finance solutions, like buy-now-pay-later, credit cards, and even tax payments at some point. Basically, everywhere where value is owed, our solutions can be deployed. Here, we also don’t just build a solution for Nigeria, but a solution that can be potentially used in every emerging market with a challenging infrastructure for collections.”

The fintech’s solution incentivises consumers that are in debt to sustainably clear their balances with the use of self-servicing solutions, communication automation, and human operations that is supported by machine learning algorithms that predict customer behavior. Overall, BFREE’s business model and product offering result in higher recovery rates for lenders and better customer experience for borrowers. 

Chukwudi Enyi, COO of BFREE explains how the fintech startup developed its business model and product offering by analysing the loopholes existing in the fintech credit and debit space. 

“All of us co-founders used to work in large digital lending fin-techs in Nigeria, and collections were always a struggle. On the one hand, you have traditional collections companies that are not very scalable and have little transparency and accountability in their processes. And on the other hand, you have classic call centers that are a bit more scalable, but not very effective and still have loopholes for misconduct. So we looked at the collection process to come up with a way to reinvent it from scratch to fix these challenges.” 

BFREE assists its clients in their personal budgeting process to repay credit and create a customised repayment plan which suits each individual’s disposable income. 

“We are really excited to have incredibly supportive investors. We are now using this support to scale our product and development team and to pilot the Kenyan market,” concludes Enyi

Read more: Startup Circles secures R2.1-million investment
Read more: Cameroon fintech secures $3-million 

Featured image: BFREE (Supplied)