FairMoney, a credit-led mobile banking platform for emerging markets in Africa and Asia, has partnered with Oradian, a cloud-based core banking system, to power its next stage of growth and product innovation.

Oradian services over 10 million banking customers, working with more than 50 tech lenders, banks and financing companies in 13 countries across Africa and Asia. Their solution enables customers to manage their bank accounts, transact 24/7, make investments and access appropriate finance and is tailored to the needs of rapidly developing markets.

These markets present a unique set of challenges - including the need for compliant financial products tailored to local regulations, the ability to operate within low-bandwidth environments and fast scaling needs as well as uninterrupted availability.

FairMoney has chosen Oradian for three reasons. Firstly, their ability to incorporate solutions to these market challenges into their architecture. Secondly, their ability to support FairMoney’s growing business, unique credit assessment abilities and product innovation. Thirdly, the ‘plug and play’ nature of Oradian’s solution, requires little core backend investment.

The growth in VC investments in African start-ups reached US$2b (£1.74b) in 2021, of which US$1b (£0.87b) was channelled to fintech companies, reaffirming the demand for flexible financial infrastructure across the African continent.

Traditional banks have shied away from offering micro-loans to businesses and consumers without collateral, yet it’s widely recognised that this group has the highest need and the biggest potential for growth.

At the same time, the African and Asian emerging markets are hungry for financial services that provide both consumer loans and working capital. This has created a big opportunity for companies that are able to move quickly and leverage recent technological advances in emerging markets, such as the move to cloud banking.

The winners will be those who can quickly fulfil the needs of both the individual consumer and the micro, small and medium enterprise (MSMEs) segments at scale.

FairMoney has been successful in executing that mission: the company became the leading credit-led digital financial institution in Nigeria two years after its incorporation.

“To be able to innovate quickly, with products that the market requires, while being compliant with changing regulations in very different markets, takes a different breed of the core system,” commented Antonio Separovic, CEO of Oradian.

“All of these are real, daily challenges in the back-office, not seen by the customers and often taken for granted. However, we know through working with a broad range of financial customers, those challenges are very real, and in some cases, insurmountable without the right technology and an expert partner.”

Also commenting on the development, Laurin Hainy, CEO of FairMoney said:

"Our ultimate goal remains bridging the financial inclusion gap in emerging economies, and we understand the power of collaboration and partnerships in bringing this to reality.

“Since the inception of FairMoney, we have continued to serve our current markets with excellent financial products, providing the much-needed access to credit and making essential banking services available to everyday people.

“We decided to partner with Oradian to leverage the already existing infrastructure and trusted system performance to scale our solutions to new markets where they are needed and perfect existing offerings in our current markets.”