Nigerian banking-as-a-service (BaaS) company Anchor has secured a $2.4 million seed round. In addition to FoundersX, Rebel Fund, and certain current investors including Y Combinator and Byld Ventures, Justin Kan’s Goat Capital led the financing round.Â
With more than $1 million in pre-seed capital, the fintech came out of stealth a year ago. Its premise was simple: give developers access to APIs, dashboards, and tools to help them embed and construct banking applications. In the congested fintech sector in Nigeria, Anchor competes with JUMO, Maplerad, OnePipe, and Bloc as one of the few BaaS providers.
Neobanks and Innovators Finding a Niche in Nigeria’s Banking Sector
In a fast-evolving digital banking environment, incumbent institutions have lazily failed to modernise their offerings. Therefore, neobanks and other companies looking to include financial services in their offerings have found these platforms to be attractive. Platforms that provide banking as a service now see a chance to offer more flexible, individualised services for a cheaper price. In supplying bank accounts, payments, savings, and cards, they help these businesses with start up funding.
Anchor collaborates with licenced banking establishments. It argues that by doing this, businesses may create financial solutions in a matter of days rather than years. When the fintech first started, it solely served accounts belonging to customers. However, according to Segun Adeyemi, co-founder and CEO of Anchor, the company’s APIs now offer payments across borders, company accounts, card issuance, paying bills, batch disbursements, and developer-only capabilities including a monitoring log system plus developer webhooks.
Even though there were a few competitors in the market before us, none of them currently offer as much as we do, the CEO of Anchor, who co-founded the company with Olamide Sobowale and Gbekeloluwa Olufotebi, said in a phone interview with TechCrunch. By examining the breadth of our offerings and contrasting them to what comparable businesses now offer, this may be verified.
By providing fintech services for these businesses, the YC-backed fintech promises to have so far produced over $550 million in annualised total transaction volume (TTV). According to the CEO, it is also boosting income by 30% month over month ever since startup fundraising. The business makes money via processing fees, account and card issuing fees, and interest from the float.
