OneFI with Flex Advance believe getting loans and cash advances for your business should be much easier no matter what type of business you run.
Meet Nkechi, Nkechi runs a food Bukka in Festac that sells out breakfast at 8am, lunch at 1pm and dinner at 5pm. The quality and taste of Nkechi’s food have helped her conquer the food business in road 12 in Festac, and now Nkechi wants to expand to office deliveries and set up shops in other areas of Festac. Nkechi registers her business name “Nkechi Foods limited” at the Corporate Affairs Commission for less than N20,000 and goes to a bank first, then a Micro finance bank next, but even after smiles and promises made are more interested in giving Nkechi a POS than actually helping her with a business loan to help expand her business.
Nkechi is determined to expand her business and sees the POS as an opportunity to reduce or stop credit payments because of the excuse of “no cash” or “ATM no dey around here”. She prints a flyer and inserts “Card payments via POS now accepted at Mama Nkechi Bukka”, and in a short time frame she is able to make POS a major form of payment with an average of 30 POS payments per day, also attracting more corporate type clients who heard about the quality of her food and the innovative approach to payments.
Mama Nkechi feeds workers and families in Festac everyday. Picture credit: Lost in Lagos.
Enter OneFI, a Nigerian company that wants to use innovation to solve real problems for consumers and business owners. OneFi’s mission started out to provide short-term and affordable consumer credit to individuals who have limited access to finance but has extended to business owners like Nkechi who through their needs have stumbled on technology, and have the potential to be even bigger with just a little help.
Working in partnership with Unified Payments Services Limited, a payments solution provider in Nigeria, One Finance & Investments Limited(Onefi) have created a product called Flex Advance that wants to give Nkechi up to 20million naira in cash advances and business advisory services to help her grow her business.
The Flex Advance product is offered to all Nigerian businesses/entrepreneurs as long as they are registered with the CAC, use a POS to conduct their business, and meet the sales volume requirements.
Speaking with Kellogg School of Management-trained Amaka Odogwu, Onefi’s VP of Business development who also held a leadership position working with small businesses as part of Konga’s marketplace operations, Flex Advance was created to address the financing needs of business owners and entrepreneurs and will continue to evolve as more businesses use the product.
In her own words; “Financing is one of the biggest issues affecting businesses in Nigeria. Through the flex advance product, we aim to empower Nigerian business owners by offering them access to working capital more conveniently and flexibly than the traditional sources. We provide working capital in the form of cash advances of up to N20 million. The amount disbursed is based on a merchant’s monthly average card sales and repayments are collected as a percentage of future daily card transactions.
The aim is two-fold: to enable these business owners access funds flexibly to grow their business, and to promote and propagate digital/cashless transactions by offering merchants incentives to offer POS as a means of payment”.
The parent company was co-founded in 2012 by Chijioke and Ngozi Dozie, Harvard and Wharton MBA-trained entrepreneurs and investors, who are also the founders of Café Neo, a silicon valley-style coffee shop enabling a collaborative space for entrepreneurs to thrive, OneFi is filling a vacuum created by the failure of traditional financial institutions to meet the emergency finance needs of low/medium income earning individuals and businesses.
You can sign up for the Flex Advance product here.
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