The funding round was led by global impact investment manager BlueOrchard and Dutch entrepreneurial development bank FMO, with $20 million injected as equity. 

This capital infusion will help in achieving Fido’s mission to empower individuals and entrepreneurs across Africa by providing swift and accessible financial services through its innovative digital platform.

Founded in 2015 by Nadav Topolski, Tomer Edry, and Nir Zepkowitz, Fido initially focused on offering loans via mobile phones. Over time, the fintech has diversified its product offerings, incorporating savings, bill payments, and smartphone financing. 

These additions have bolstered Fido’s revenue streams and strengthened its ability to compete in the African digital lending space, where it stands alongside other major players like Branch and Tala. 

Unlike traditional banks that require collateral and lengthy paperwork, Fido leverages mobile technology and alternative data sources to provide instant micro-loans to individuals and small businesses, particularly those overlooked by conventional financial institutions.

CEO Alon Eitan highlighted the important role that small businesses play in driving economies in sub-Saharan Africa, yet they often lack access to essential financial tools. 

Fido’s platform addresses this gap by offering loans ranging from $20 to $500 to individuals, with higher amounts available to businesses based on their needs and credit scores. 

These loans, which come with embedded insurance, are repayable within six months at interest rates between 7% and 12%. Fido’s default rate remains below 4%, thanks to its strong credit scoring system.

Fido is making an impact which goes beyond providing credit, it also encourages smart financial habits through its Fido Score, helping users build a digital financial identity. The fintech has served over a million customers across Ghana and Uganda, distributing more than $500 million in loans. 

Fido aims to surpass $1 billion in total disbursements by early next year, further expanding its reach and deepening its impact on African entrepreneurs and individuals striving to improve their financial well-being.

The round was led by Israel-based private equity fund Fortissimo Capital and included participation from other investors such as Yard Ventures; a VC fund by Harvard alumni. 

Fido focuses on linking entrepreneurs with financial opportunities in Africa, which is a major hindrance to the growth of several businesses. 

The company automates the whole financial services process for customers from onboarding to credit analysis and provides financial guidance as well. It leverages machine learning-risk models, making instant credit decisions even for customers with no financial track record while helping reduce operational costs.

Fido’s real-time machine learning models, in line with its data-driven application built on a distributed cloud architecture, help boost accessibility to financial services to unbanked regions, make risk scoring and fraud detection seamless, based on non-financial data, to approve or reject a loan, and simultaneously deliver market-leading default rates. 

Fido gives up to $250 mobile loans to individuals and small businesses, which are repayable through single or multiple installments for a period of up to six months. 

Co-founded by Nadav Topolski, Tomer Edry and Nir Zepkowitz, Fido plans to include savings and payment products in its portfolio later this year, and establish operations in Uganda, its second market, in line with its expansion plan into other regions in Africa. 

The fintech affirms to have issued over $1.5 million loans to 350,000 customers in Ghana and is set to increase this as it enters other markets in the continent.

The fintech also plans to open its second research and development center in Accra, Ghana, which will augment its Israel branch, to help it automate most of its operations to ensure sustainability in the long term.

In the case of tighter security measures, two-factor authentication is also available to use. The more expansive your digital footprint is, the more you have a lot of passwords to remember.

Sometimes these passwords are hard to remember, and many users are guilty of reusing one particular password on different accounts. 

Security experts recommend that users create strong passwords and change them periodically to ensure security.

According to findings, 81% of all hacking-based security breaches can be traced back to poor passwords. 

So, the latest information is that the Fast Identity Online (FIDO) Alliance will replace the use of passwords.

FIDO is an open authentication standard that allows any service provider to leverage existing technologies for passwordless. 

With this emerging technology, users can log into apps and social media accounts using the same fast authentication method they used to unlock their phones. 

It’s designed to let websites and apps offer secure sign-ins to users across a range of device platforms. The protocol is already supported on a range of apps and websites, and Apple, Google, and Microsoft have been building them into their own services. 

However, up until now, users will continue to sign in to a website or app with every device individually before they can go passwordless in the future. 

In a recent blog post shared by Apple, password-only authentication is “one of the biggest security problems on the web”. 

Apple also claims the standard will protect against phishing scams, making them supposedly safer than a traditional password or one-time code sent to your inbox. 

According to  Alex Simons, corporate vice president for Identity Program Management at Microsoft, the complete shift to a passwordless world will begin with consumers making it a natural part of their lives. 

“Any viable solution must be safer, easier, and faster than the passwords and legacy multi-factor authentication methods used today,” 

“By working together as a community across platforms, we can, at last, achieve this vision and make significant progress toward eliminating passwords. 

We see a bright future for FIDO-based credentials in both consumer and enterprise scenarios and will continue to build support across Microsoft apps and services.”