ImpactAlpha, March 22 – A raft of tech-enabled companies are delivering essential goods and services, such as food supplies and transportation, to low-income customers worldwide. They’re increasingly embedding financial services in their business models to improve affordability and boost financial inclusion.
Dubai-based Credable wants to accelerate “embedded finance” by designing products and back-end tech for banks, telecom companies and other service providers.
Credable raised a $2.5 million seed round backed by Ventures Platform, Launch Africa and others.
Access channels
Low-income customers interact daily with tech-based services, like mobile networks, e-commerce and gig apps, Credable’s Nadeem Juma told TechCrunch. “Rather than try to create a new channel to bank these customers, we aim to enable these channels through a B2B2C offering that provides the customers with the banking services they need in the channels they’re already in.”
Credable’s customers include Vodacom M-Pesa in Tanzania and Diamond Trust Bank in Kenya.
Maturing technology
Essential services startups have largely been raising their own capital to on-lend, as Trukkr in Pakistan is doing, or leveraging customer data to enlist traditional banks and financial institutions to do the lending.
The emergence of “banking-as-a-service” providers like Credable suggests the ecosystem is evolving and disaggregating.