Nigerian Digital Bank, Yep! Secures $1.5M Pre-Seed

Nigeria-based financial super app, Yep!, has raised $1.5 million in a pre-seed round led by pan-African VC Greenhouse Capital.

The super app provides customers and users with payments, remittance and banking features. According to the startup,  the funds will be used to facilitate its plans to go live across the five markets where E-Settlement is present, to enable it serve digital financial services to consumers, small business owners and merchants.

Yep! was founded by Olaoluwa Awojoodu. The company’s agent banking platform, PayCentre Africa, is also present in Niger, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Togo as well as Nigeria.

In Nigeria, it is estimated that over 42 million adults living in rural areas have little or no access to basic banking services. In line with this issue, agency banking in the African countries where it is located serves to solve this issue. Agency banking fosters financial inclusion, however, there is still need for the underserved to be brought into an all-around digital ecosystem that provides access to the full spectrum of financial services.

Speaking about the super app, Awojoodu said: “We want to bank the guys in Lagos as well as bank the guys in a village at Ikot Ekpene. And at the same time, not just Nigeria, we are also looking at a full African play. So it’s just really that financial access for Africans, not just the 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.”

The founders of Yep! has built this supper app with the need to provide solution and foster financial inclusion.

The San Francisco and Lagos-headquartered startup, will however, work towards onboarding customers who use banks as well as other digital-only platforms like Kuda, Carbon and FairMoney. Yep! will provide account opening options, debit card issuance, bill payments and credit financing services to online consumers, and financial management services to both consumers and businesses.

The company currently claims to have a $500,000 credit facility to kick-start working capital loans to its existing merchants. However, Awojoodu disclosed that they’re in discussions with international credit providers to increase this to $10 million by the end of 2022.