Naspers’ brings its Financial Services to Africa Targeting the Financially Excluded Population
Naspers, one of the largest technology investors in the world and the largest company in Africa according to market value, has plans to bring its financial services to all of its PayU markets including Africa. South Africa will be the first country to benefit from Naspers’ lending services followed by other African markets. “Naspers has intention to support its lending activities using its own funds”, said the CEO, Bob van Dijk. This will be mainly initiated in countries where Naspers in confident about their customers’ capacity to repay their loans.
Naspers will establish partnerships with several technology companies including MTN and Vodacom which are some of Africa’s largest mobile operators targeting the whole of the sub-Saharan Africa region. This has been viewed as the right strategy to reach the untapped markets in the financial services industry. In many African countries, many people are financially excluded and access to credit remains extremely low. This new initiative will help reach a large size of the population which is excluded from traditional banking and other financial services.
PayU is an online payment system which provides more than 220 payment options, was awarded for providing the best payment solution supporting the growth in online sales and cashless transactions. PayU is currently present in South Africa and Nigeria and has other businesses in the USA, Asia, Europe and the Middle East. The World Bank reports also highlighted that in Nigeria, only 5% of the Nigerian adults borrowed from financial institutions or used their credit cards during 2017 as compared with 14% in South Africa and 70% of North America.
“We can provide people with loans that other people can’t, so you’re really providing them with an opportunity that the normal banking system wouldn’t, based on the data we have, which is an exciting thing”, said the CEO.