26/6/2018 – AsiaKredit, a Singapore-based fintech startup has today raised an undisclosed funding from SIG Asia investments, a venture capital investment arm of Susquehanna International Group.
This investment serves as a bridge round between AsiaKredit’s pre-Series A and Series A rounds, thus bringing forth the total aggregated funding to US$2.5 million since its launch in November 2017,
The startup had last raised US$675,000 in a combined pre-Series A and seed funding round backed by Fintonia Group, FORUM, Reliance Indonesia Group, and Space Ventures.
According to AsiaKredit, the investment funds will be used as loan capital, as well as to enhance its proprietary technology platform, underwriting, collections infrastructure and to develop new products. The startup is also looking to expand its services to other Southeast Asian markets.
AsiaKredit operates a consumer lending mobile application known as pera247 in the Philippines. The app provides unsecured small-ticket, short-term consumer loans for up to 90 days to the country’s underbanked population with no existing credit or collateral history.
In fact, the startup claims to have processed more than 100,000 loan applications within six months after its launch and is seeing over 100 percent customer growth each month, with more than 50 percent of them being recurring customers.
“We are thrilled to have SIG on board.” said AsiaKredit co-founder and CEO Michael Singh. “SIG has a proven track record in identifying winners in this space, having invested early in digital lenders that have later listed on Nasdaq and in companies at the forefront of alternative credit scoring in Asia.”
Designed to provide the shortest real-time credit decision by any platform on the market where the decision to loan is made within hours, pera247 uses data-driven credit assessment tools to analyse mobile behavioral data and other alternative sources of data.
The platform has since demonstrated rapid improvement in portfolio quality and reached product-level profitability within four months of its launch.
“Although we currently focus on short-term loans on the higher end of the risk spectrum, we plan to move into longer duration, lower risk products such as personal instalment loans in the next six to 12 month,” Michael added
Commenting on the deal, SIG noted that AsiaKredit is building a market-leading, fully digital lending platform that provides millions of financially excluded people in the Philippines with fast and convenient access to credit – something that the traditional banking sector is not always able to provide.
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