JUMO, a South African fintech platform has closed an equity funding round of USD$52 million led by Goldman Sachs to further its growth and expansion into new markets. JUMO has offices in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Ghana, Zambia, Pakistan, United Kingdom, Singapore and South Africa.
Other leading investors including Proparco, the private sector financing arm of the French Development Agency (AFD), Finnfund, Vostok Emerging Finance, Gemcorp Capital, and LeapFrog Investments participated in the round. This funding round represents Goldman Sachs, Proparco and Finnfund’s maiden investments into JUMO.
According to Jules Frebault, Executive Director at Goldman Sachs,“There is immense opportunity across Africa and beyond for JUMO to build on their successful track record developing digital marketplace infrastructure to offer mobile subscribers access to relevant financial products. We are excited to partner with this highly capable team as they continue to leverage technology to advance financial inclusion.”
JUMO’s technology is a highly agile and scalable Platform as a Service (PaaS) for operating inclusive and profitable financial marketplaces, adapting quickly to customer needs with solutions that improve their lives. The company partners with many of the largest, most forward-thinking banks and mobile money operators to offer individuals and small businesses savings and credit products via mobile devices. Through its existing partnerships, nearly 120 million mobile users are currently able to connect to the JUMO platform.
Over two billion people in the world have limited or no access to essential financial services, many of them live in emerging markets and are coming online for the first time via mobile. These are the people JUMO is connecting with to provide great choices from leading banks. Given high feature phone usage in key markets as well as customer sensitivity to data costs, JUMO offers transactional capability via basic USSD, Web or App to allow broad-based access and usage of the platform and products.
Since its launch in 2014, more than 9 million people have saved or borrowed on the JUMO platform, with nearly 70% of these being micro and small business owners. To date, JUMO has originated over USD$700 million in loans on its platform and manages over 25 million customer interactions per month.
CEO of JUMO, Andrew Watkins-Ball, who has relocated to Singapore to support the company’s growth in Asia, commented, “The support of Goldman Sachs and our other investors is a significant endorsement of JUMO. We are working hard to connect hundreds of millions of people with access to the best possible choices from leading banks. We are proving that the evolution of computation and storage means that there is no longer any reason why the best financial products should not be available to people in the early stages of building wealth.”