Yep! Nigerian Start-up Digital Bank Raises $1.5M Pre-seed to Help the Unbanked Customers

36% of Nigeria’s adult are financially excluded. Financial inclusion has been strategy of the government to extend formal financial service to the unbanked. Women continue to be financially excluded than men, with women 45% and men 50%.

Agency banking helped change the paradigm driven majorly by fintech start-ups like OPAY, TeamApt, Paga and telco players like MTN. Yep! a digital bank start-up just launched a “financial super app” with payments, remittance and banking features, The start-up digital bank announced that it has just raised $1.5Million in pre-seed round led by pan-African VC Greenhouse Capital.

The CEO Olaoluwa Awojoodu once affirmed, ” We want to bank the guys in Lagos as well as bank the guys in a village at Ikot Ekpenne. And at the same time, not just Nigeria, we are also looking at the full African play.” He also reiterated, ” So also just really financial access for Africans, not just guys that are digitally enabled, but even the guys that are off the digital channels, we are going to bring everybody into the digital environment using both digital tools and agent networks.”

Yep! is a digital start-up bank founded by Olaoluwa Awojoodu, Airende Ojeomogha, and Garry Ottosen. One of the founders also affirmed that, ” We can now start banking consumers because we now hold their money and we can also bank our agents. So we kind of closed all the ecosystem bringing agents, and merchants, businesses and consumers all in one ecosystem.”

The San Fransisco and Lagos based start-up will target customers that also use banks and other digital platforms like Kuda, Carbon and Fairmoney. In Nigeria more than 42million adults  who live in rural areas lack basic financial services.

The founders built Yep! with the mindset of targeting the underbanked and unbanked, the first step the founders took was acquiring a micro-finance license a must for any fintech start-up that wants to hold consumers money. The competitive edge of Yep! is according to the founders the superior experience in raising debt capital for lending purposes.

Ojeomogha has experience in investment banking, Ottosen also has built lending programs for several financial services in the U.S. One of the co-founders opined, ” We’ve offered agent lending in the past and got low single digits default. We’ve taken a different approach to some of these things more strategically. Garry and I have raised hundreds of million of debts, so access to credit facilities is an advantage for us including the fact that we raised those facilities pretty quickly.”

One of the founders also affirmed, ” Another competitive advantage we have is a tonne of data.” He also said,” And I think one of the reason I was excited to come over is that I’ve spent years building credit sorts of models and helped build a couple of banks. We have a roadmap to start lending to our agents and because it’s a digital bank, we’ll be able to reach deep into both Nigeria and Francophone Africa.”

Yep! hopes to use the pre-seed investment to increase its agent network to over 200,000 by the end of 2022.