I like reading Maro Elias and he has another nice one. Like I have noted, I missed the opportunity to invest in Kuda despite all the efforts by the founders. The piece by Maro offers some insights why sometimes, the best things are packaged in simple ways!
Anyways, Kuda is a great example of what twenty first century African innovation looks like. To be clear, I do not think Kuda is profitable – neither do I believe they’re a US$500million business, and considering their model of not charging for bank transfers (at least the first 25 monthly), which is an extremely high customer acquisition cost, I find it hard to understand their business model, but considering the fact they have investors like Valar Ventures, Target Global and SBI on their term sheet, I want to believe they have access to some internal data I have very little knowledge about.
But note, nothing has happened – we are still at infancy on this. There is one fintech startup I got in a few days ago. In 6 months, they added 150k users. If all goes as roadmapped based on compounding leverages we have activated, they plan to hit 1.2 million users by December; I will not share until Tekedia Capital members have been offered an exclusive path to invest on this next month; you can join us here.
It is a beauty and led by one of the nation’s best. So, nothing has happened because this digitization of Nigeria’s economy would be decades-long. We are still at infancy across all sectors including banking.
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How? The market cap of one South African bank is more than the total market cap of Nigeria’s financial sector. Yes, Standard Bank of South Africa’s $15.5 billion market cap is more than the value of Nigeria’s banking and insurance sectors combined! Simply, Nigeria has growth ahead because nothing has happened.
Now, read Maro…
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