Lagos, Nigeria. October 11, 2021 – Focused on improving financial inclusion in Nigeria and other emerging markets through automated credit assessment tools that close the consumer credit gap and help financial institutions provide credit facilities to the financially excluded, Canadian fintech startup, Periculum, has raised a $620,000 pre-seed funding round. This will help it to expand its team, improve product development and scale its operations in Nigeria and other markets.
Founded in 2019, Periculum, helps its banking and lending customers identify fraud risk, assess creditworthiness, and analyze its existing data. Periculum offers real-time decision-making, analysis, and credit underwriting solutions to financial institutions including banks, non-banking financial companies, and fintech companies. By providing information on the financial worthiness of customers and automating the loan decisioning process, Periculum’s customers can gather and analyze borrower information and assign a credit score faster, with real outcomes on financial inclusion in Nigeria and other markets.
Periculum offers data aggregation APIs and platform solutions that aggregate data from partners including Mono and the CRC Credit Bureau, to provide complete financial and data profiles of prospective borrowers and third-party entities. Some of its clients include Fundii, Lendaba, and Venero.
According to the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System Plc (NIBSS), only 48 million Nigerians, as of May 30, 2021, had a BVN. With an adult population of 105 million according to the World Population Review, 57 million Nigerians are currently out of reach to financial services. Unfortunately, credit bureaus that provide information to banks, only cover 13.9% of the population in Nigeria, with no information on the creditworthiness of the bulk of potential borrowers.
Periculum is committed to addressing this challenge.
According to Michael Temitope Collins, Periculum’s founder and Chief Executive Officer, “Periculum is a top provider of data analytics and credit assessment services targeted explicitly to underserved markets. We help our customers to reduce their lengthy loan application processing times and loan default rates and offer loans to the underbanked and unbanked consumers and micro, small and medium-scale enterprises. But our data analytic capabilities go beyond credit scoring. We can help our customers with solutions such as fraud detection, insights for lenders based on customer segmentation and customer lifecycle value, insights to retailers and ATM operators, and several other advantages”.
The startup was accepted into Techstars in 2021 and is among the current 2021 Techstars Montréal AI cohort, as well as the Founder Institutes Select portfolio. It has raised $620,000 from Techstars, Loyal VC, First Fund, and White Hibiscus Capital. Periculum currently delivers services to customers in Canada, Nigeria, and Kenya.
For many countries in Africa, there is still a financial divide. By tackling the credit assessment challenge, Periculum can build the financial infrastructure that helps in addressing the issue of access to financial services and improves development outcomes for millions of people, with better opportunities for businesses, financial institutions, and lenders.
