Serial entrepreneur Tunde Kehinde launches new financial service platform “Lidya”

Branchless lender Lidya plans to target small businesses

Earlier this month, serial entrepreneur, Tunde Kehinde announced the launch of a new financial services platform called Lidya.

Marketed as a digital bank that will have no branches, Lidya will be based in Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital, and offer small and medium-sized businesses unsecured loans of between US$500 and US$15,000.
While it will initially focus on Nigerian customers, Lidya will target cities across Africa.

“There are no real products catered to these customers today,” Kehinde said. “What we are trying to do is introduce a lot of technology, algorithms and machine learning to industrialize the credit assessment process.”

Kehinde, a Harvard Business School graduate, is a former managing director of Jumia, – Africa’s biggest online retailer. He is also the co-founder of the Africa Courier Express, a logistics company, along with Ercin Eksin, the other founder of Lidya.

While Kehinde and Eksin are the majority owners, they will look to bring in other shareholders and raise more than US$1 million in the next few months from investors.

Lidya will be opened next month and also partner with Nigerian banks to allow them to use it as a platform to target small businesses.
“Because of how the banks are set up, with bricks and mortar networks, they are more inclined to service multinationals and large government institutions,” Kehinde said.
“Their cost structure is not favorable to servicing small businesses. Because we are using technology and algorithms to assess the risk, it allows them to offer financial products to these customers at a low cost.”

Source: Bloomberg