Fido

Democratizing access to capital in Ghana and across Africa

Company: Fido operates a digital financing platform designed to offer access to instant credit loans. The company's platform, which is currently in market in Ghana and expanding across Africa, offers credit to individuals without any fees, collateral, or guarantors, enabling users to have fast and easy access to funds.

HQ Location & Year Founded: Accra, Ghana and Tel Aviv, Israel, 2013

Founder: Nadav Topolski, Co-founder and President (interviewed) is an international entrepreneur with a passion for emerging markets and Africa in particular. He has worked extensively as a financial consultant in Africa and has also worked closely with his mentor Len Blavatnik of Access Industries, a major global investor in the media, telecommunications, chemicals, real estate and financial sectors. Nadav graduated in computer science and economics from the University of Haifa (Israel) and has an MBA from Harvard Business School. In addition, Fido’s CEO Alon Eitan joined the company in mid-2021 after having led strategy and corporate development at Guesty, a leading hospitality software platform. Alon has also worked in venture capital and M&A at Clal Industries and as a valuation and strategy advisor with PwC. He holds degrees in finance, accounting and economics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv University.

Funds Raised and VC Investors: $38 million from Alumni Ventures, Fortissimo Capital and angel investors

• Where did the idea for Fido originate?

The idea originated a few years ago when Tomer, Nir and I, old friends from Haifa, were working in different capacities in Africa and wanted to find an interesting problem to solve together. I was then reading the book Poor Economics authored by Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, both professors of Economics at MIT and Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences laureates. The book discusses the problem of the lack of access to financing as one of the main obstacles for growth in poor economics.This became the problem we were and are still excited to solve.

• What is the key problem that Fido intends to solve? 

Lack of access to financial services is a key constraint on the growth of entrepreneurship in Africa. The banking sector is complicated and bureaucratic, its processes are time consuming and not really customer friendly, so access to financial services remains beyond the reach of a significant segment of the population. 

• How are you most differentiated as a service?

Fido changes this paradigm by automating the whole customer journey from onboarding to credit analysis and even provides financial guidance. Our autonomous banking platform and unique machine learning-risk models, make instant credit decisions even for customers with no financial track record, while helping reduce operational costs. Fido’s autonomous banking system relies on mission-critical, real-time machine learning models for risk scoring and fraud detection, based on non-financial data, to approve or reject a loan in real-time, and simultaneously deliver market-leading default rates. The B2C mobile application is fast, data-driven, low latency, and built on a distributed cloud architecture, helping boost accessibility to financial services to unbanked regions. We are going beyond just digital-financial services and aim to educate customers on how to improve their credit scores over time and incentivize positive financial behavior. Later this year, we plan to launch savings and cost-effective payment products in some of its markets to help users easily improve their financial health with a product that’s simple to use.

• What are the company’s key accomplishments to date?

The company has grown to a team of 60 that includes data scientists, engineers, and financiers, while already having underwritten 1.5 million loans to more than 340,000 customers at a value of over $150 million. Moreover, Fido was just named the #1 app in the Ghana Play Store!

• What lies ahead in the plans for Fido?

We are planning to launch new financial products in Ghana such as savings and payments, grow our customer base across Africa, and establish a tech center in Accra to train engineers for higher levels of software development. We are building a new culture of money in Africa by making financial services instant and accessible.

Ron’s Take

Fido’s strategy of providing credit and banking services to the unbanked gets right to the heart of solving one of the biggest problems that people living in emerging economies face. Traditional banks and other financial institutions have proven unable or unwilling to accept the risk of working with small individual customers who come from modest financial means. This is the chicken-and-egg problem that Fido and other neobanking companies like them are working to solve. In Fido’s case, this is being done by leveraging machine learning technology that has been previously untapped in order to grow the market of borrowers and operate efficiently at scale. As Fido expands in Ghana and soon launches into other sub-Saharan Africa nations, the continent is sure to rise as more and more people are empowered to achieve their goals.

Disclaimer: Alumni Ventures invested in the Series A round of Fido in June 2022.