FairMoney

FairMoney has spent the past year quietly turning a phone-based lending app into something closer to an ordinary bank. The company started out in 2017 offering short-term loans assessed through smartphone data rather than paperwork, and it has kept that credit-first identity even as it added the trappings of a full microfinance bank: current accounts, fixed-term deposits, debit cards and point-of-sale terminals for merchants.

That growth has come almost entirely from Nigeria, where FairMoney holds its microfinance banking licence under the registered name MyCredit Investments Limited, even though the group itself is structured as a French company incorporated in Paris in 2017 under holding company Predictus SAS, alongside a smaller lending operation in India launched in 2020.

FairMoney's clearest attempt at regional expansion beyond Nigeria and India has stalled short of a deal. In February 2024, reports surfaced that the company was in early discussions to acquire Kenyan digital bank Umba in an all-stock transaction worth around $20 million; as of the most recent public reporting, no acquisition has been formally announced.

FairMoney's recent story is one of consolidation rather than dramatic expansion: a steady climb in loan disbursements and savings deposits in its home market, a licence in Nigeria that keeps deepening rather than widening, and a regional ambition in East Africa that, for now, remains a conversation rather than a completed acquisition.