CrowdForce secures $3.6m to expand financial inclusion across Nigeria

CROWDFORCE, A NIGERIAN FIN TECH AGENT DISTRIBUTION PLATFORM, has raised a $3.6 million pre Series-A investment aimed at addressing challenges hindering financial services availability by deepening its financial service offerings to unbanked and underbanked communities.

The equity and debt round was led by private equity firm, Aruwa Capital Management, with participation from HAVAÍC and AAIC.

CrowdForce in a statement disclosed that the capital will be partly employed in expanding its team, geographical operations and marketing.

The startup, which has partnered with 19,000 fuel stations, 20,000 resellers and 7,000 pharmacies to broaden its distribution network, also disclosed plans to increase its 7,000-strong active agent network three-fold this year by distributing more point of sale terminals to small businesses and aggregators in the next 12 to 18 months, in its effort to provide financial services within one kilometre, or within 15 minutes duration of all Nigerians.

In addition, CrowdForce said it would create an innovative banking method by partnering with larger traditional businesses such as petrol stations, and turning them into mobile bank branches that offer float services while storing their cash on its PayForce digital wallet.

It explained that this will save agents the trouble of having to travel distances to the bank in a bid to refinance their working capital.

Oluwatomi Ayorinde, CrowdForce’s chief executive and co-founder, commenting on the investment, emphasised a clear need to build an offline distribution network to enable fintechs and challengers to reach the mass market.

“This is exactly what we’re doing at CrowdForce; and this round will accelerate our momentum even more,” he added.

According to him, despite the fact that fintechs and challenger banks are emerging in Africa to deliver better financial services via digital rail, physical cash transactions still dominate Nigeria’s financial space as 97 percent of retail transactions happen offline.

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