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AFRICA • FINANCIAL SERVICES
Nadia Mykhalevych
SEPT. 11, 2019
QuickCheck started as an experiment that the company CTO Luis Rodrigues built over a weekend back in 2017. At that time, an idea to offer loans via a mobile app was new in Nigeria but seemed like a perfect solution to a very sharp problem — lack of access to credit, especially when it comes to the low-income population. Getting a loan from a Nigerian bank can easily become a nightmare, from the journey to the branch office to the highly bureaucratic and time-consuming application, which in most cases requires the borrower to bring along collaterals and guarantors.
At that time, testing for problem/solution fit ended up with an overwhelming amount of downloads and responses, which made the team to pause the experiment and prepare for the product launch.
After 2 years, QuickCheck is one of Seedstars’ portfolio companies that employs over 30 people in Nigeria and processes nearly 2500 transactions daily. It already disbursed around 5M USD in micro loans ranging between 13 and 550 USD.
Today is a big day for QuickCheck. Its new app has been released and it has got a fresh look, with improved usability and functionality. This moment is not just about refreshing the brand and refining the app graphic interface, but it brings a brand new level of user experience. Together with the redesign, the app got a unique feature — instant credit scoring. It takes less than 5 seconds for a customer to find out whether the loan application has been approved or rejected. Once the credit offer is accepted, the money is automatically transferred to the customer’s bank account in less than 5 minutes while the same process in the traditional financial institutions takes days or even weeks.
Having built its own credit scoring algorithm based on artificial intelligence and applied to non-traditional data, the internal data science team actively works on the improvement of the assessment technology to make the procedure of getting a loan even faster, more streamlined, and tailored to the needs of different groups.
“Currently, we are experiencing exponential organic growth and are closing a couple of strategic partnerships to get even closer to our customers, by integrating our technology and credit offering where they need it, within those channels they are already accustomed to. We strongly believe in the product innovation, and therefore, we invest a lot in the exploration of complementary products”, Fabiano di Tomaso, CEO of QuickCheck.
The majority of QuickCheck’s customers are Millennials, either the employed ones, but who lack money for some emergency cases or extra expenses or micro-entrepreneurs who often want to buy inventory and grow their businesses.
There are three credit bureaus in the country but they cover the needs of only a tiny segment of the population. The risk for lenders is quite high in this situation as they cannot rely on a credit bureau to check who is an unreliable payer and reject him automatically.
With their tech solution, QuickCheck not only bridges the financial inclusion gap but also educates people about financial instruments and the risks related to loans and overindebtedness. Every day, hundreds of people from Nigeria can benefit from the speed and hassle-free access to credit — no papers, no queues, no collateral, no guarantors, just a smartphone and QuickCheck app available on Google Play Store.
The company team believes in the in double-faced businesses — economically sustainable and at the same time, socially impactful one. Quickcheck’s ultimate goal to ensure financial inclusion for every Nigerian through their digital financial services.
“FinTech solutions like QuickCheck have a huge potential to impact thousands of people in emerging markets. We already can witness how our mobile app impacts our clients’ well-being and brings a new level of quality to their lives. This app relaunch is a crucial milestone for our business, as we would be able to expand our activities further in the country and region and provide more people with access to fast and reliable micro-credit”, - Luis Rodrigues, CTO of QuickCheck
