E-commerce specialist Jumia aims to grow lending service
Jumia, the pan-African e-commerce group partially owned by MTN, wants to take its lending platform to new markets in the region to help its merchant partners get access to funding, says co-CEO Sacha Poignonnec. Many of the 50,000 businesses that sold goods on the Jumia platform were unable to get loans as financial institutions did not have enough data about them, Poignonnec said.
"But we have data on those sellers. We know how much business they do, we have a distribution relationship with them and to some extent we also have some collateral because their money is processed on Jumia." In 2017, the business often referred to as Africa’s own Amazon.com started partnering with banks to offer loans to its vendors. "We offer that now in four of our 14 markets," Poignonnec said. We are still learning … and we plan to have it in more markets," he said. E-commerce rival E-commerce rival Naspers also plans to offer lending services in SA and Nigeria. Unlike Jumia, Naspers has said it ...
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