Nigerian Fintech Startup Mono Wants to Redefine Data Accessibility in Africa
Three months after it made it into the Y Combinator startup acceleration programme, a Nigerian fintech startup, Mono has spotlighted its ambition to go beyond fintech and streamline the access to personal data in a way it has never been done before in the country and Africa as a whole.
The startup, which launched in August 2020, unifies various financial data into a single API for businesses and third-party developers. With the permission of the users, Mono allows businesses to retrieve information such as account statements, real-time balances, past transactions, revenue, cost, and account owner identity.
The fintech startup recently received $2M in seed funding. The investment comes nine months after the company received $125,000 from YC and two months after raising $500,000 in pre-seed last September. Entrée Capital – one of the investors in Kuda’s seed round, Kuda co-founder and CEO Babs Ogundeyi, Gbenga Oyebode, partner at TCVP, and Eric Idiahi, co-founder and partner at Verod Capital are among the new round’s investors. New york-based but Africa-focused VC Lateral Capital also participated in Mono’s seed funding round.
Open finance players like Mono are working to boost financial inclusion and connectivity in a region where more than half of the population is unbanked or underbanked. Open finance is based on the idea that giving underbanked people access to a financial ecosystem through open APIs and new ways to transfer capital, access financial data, and make borrowing decisions lowers the barriers to entry.
The fintech startup has already established partnerships with more than 16 Nigerian financial institutions. Mono has linked over 100,000 financial accounts for its partners and analysed over 66 million financial transactions, in addition to providing a few hundred businesses such as Carbon, Aella Credit, Credpal, Renmoney, Autochek, and Inflow Finance access to customers’ bank accounts for bank statements, identity details, and balances.
Mono has accomplished a lot in a short amount of time. the fintech startup seems to be on the right trajectory and CEO Abdul Hassan points out this is just the begining. The real prize according to him, is to become a data company.
“The way I see it, our market is not that big. Compare the payments market now with 2016, when Paystack and Flutterwave just started. The payments space in 2016 was very small and the number of people using cards online was very small”, he said.
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