Movel Mobility

2.5B+ people across the world lack access to formal credit and face financial exclusion, which has created a $360B credit gap in Africa alone. Traditional lenders cannot scale SME lending due to poor customer experiences, poor credit capabilities and overall limited reach. There is now a massive opportunity for developments in mobile technology to improve financial inclusion in Africa. Movel discovered a unique initial foothold in the mobility sector: gig workers, in particular mobility entrepreneurs. Despite having steady work, they cannot access capital to purchase motorcycles or even to pay for everyday expenses. This group represents the fastest growing demographic in Africa today with a $100B unmet need for capital. 

Movel Mobility was founded with the mission to unlock financial services for African mobility entrepreneurs. Our first product is financing, strategically starting with the idea that we can finance a motorcycle today and help them save and invest tomorrow.

Movel has created a completely digital end-to-end lending marketplace, enabling mobility entrepreneurs to access financial services and investors to invest directly in Movel's loans. 

Within our first target market of mobility, customers typically come to Movel for a motorcycle to support their logistics business. By working with Movel, riders no longer have to lease motorcycles thereby doubling their earning potential. Our approach is built for scale: B2B2C. We look to partner directly with gig economy companies. to finance their riders' purchases of motorcycles. In exchange, we receive data about applicants such as their customer ratings, trips completed, and money earned which helps us understand their creditworthiness. All of our partners operate in multiple markets across Africa, ensuring we'll be able to scale cost-effectively. 

We hook customers through motorcycle financing; and as they start to pay down their loan, building equity in their motorcycle, we offer them additional products like buying fuel on credit, smartphone financing, and airtime loans.

Asset financing is the most critically unmet need of Africa’s two biggest demographics: informal and formal workers. We are starting with credit now and will offer insurance and savings in the future.

 2.5B+ people across the world lack access to formal credit and face financial exclusion, which has created a $360B credit gap in Africa alone. 

A customer comes to Movel for a motorcycle loan to help their business flourish, but they stay for the additional products that they are able to tap into. As a borrower builds equity into their motorcycle loan, they can tap into analogous products.

Benjamin Mebele: As CEO, Benjamin is responsible for Movel's strategy and identifying, establishing, and scaling partnerships. Benjamin has 7 years of experience in business development, he has increased the revenue of a SAAS company by 250% margin in 1 year. He lead a team of 20 employees in a busy food research and analysis firm. Benjamin conducted field research in 10 states (Delta, Kwara, Lagos, Nasarawa, Kogi, Imo, Benue, Abia, Niger, and Ibadan) across Nigeria to better understand how the poor save and borrow money without access to banks. This early research informed Benjamin’s mission to redefine finance in emerging markets

Valerie Okpagu: As COO, Valerie is focused on managing Movel's sales, underwriting, and loan servicing teams. Valerie was most recently the Head of IT and Operations at Empowering Shelves, an international educational-focused NGO. Before Empowering Shelves, Valerie consulted with various companies and government agencies on how to better improve their digital offerings and presence.

Jason Antonidei: As CTO, Jason is responsible for all of Movel's technology. Jason most recently was the CTO at Bixt Global, where he was a team lead on front and back-end development projects. He was previously a software engineer at Core Elites Tekhub and has worn various hats at early to mid-stage startups. Jason is building Movel’s mobile platform and automating the loan origination process.

We have given out 150+ total motorcycles, worth $100k and maintained a 95% payment collection rate. We have amassed a wealth of data that has enabled us to automate credit scoring and recovery processes.

In other to unlock credit access for African SMEs, and make Africa investable to the outside world. We are applying to Solve to receive monitoring and evaluation support to build an impact measurement practice.

Movel has created an end-to-end digital lending platform that allows mobility entrepreneurs and SMEs to receive motorcycle financing and build credit. Digital verification means we onboard with less friction, streamlining the application process and reducing fraud. Our highly integrated assessment tools mean we can easily collect repayments and reduce loan risk.

The entire Movel experience is digital. Potential borrowers fill out an application using our website, get credit scores instantly, and can receive their motorcycles in hours, not weeks like traditional African commercial banks. 

Our soon-to-be-completed platform, the Admin Panel, is a core banking system we are building from scratch. It streamlines the entire customer experience, allowing us to quickly provide multiple financial products and manage a rapidly growing credit portfolio. Through Asaak’s proprietary digital loan origination system and Standard Bank’s presence across the continent, the two companies are well poised to offer financial services to Africa’s 600M informal workers & beyond.

Our goal in the next five years is to collaborate with an African bank, focusing on empowering entrepreneurs to have access to sustainable financial services, from initial motorcycle financing to savings accounts, insurance, and investment products, and beyond using Movel’s motorcycle financing system across the continent, to offer financial services to Africa’s 600M informal workers & beyond.

By 2030, eradicate extreme poverty for all people everywhere, currently measured as people living on less than $1.25 a day - We intend to finance 2,000 motorcycles by 2024 to help people across the African continent to be meaningfully employed.

Sustain per capita economic growth in accordance with national circumstances and, in particular, at least 7 percent gross domestic product growth per annum in the least developed countries - Our activities will help foster economic growth through our financial services offering.

We strive to unlock credit access for African SMEs, who primarily lack access to formal credit and face financial exclusion.

An end-to-end digital lending platform that allows mobility entrepreneurs and SMEs to receive motorcycle financing and build credit.

We currently have a team of 15 individuals who work at Movel Mobility and 50 percent of them are women.

Movel operates a B2B2C business model. We partner directly with rapidly scaling businesses like logistics companies to offer their customers financial services. This approach has drastically lowered our customer acquisition cost and enabled us to focus more on the core functions of our business: software development, underwriting, and portfolio monitoring. By focusing deeply on these three areas, we are creating a larger moat around our business and truly differentiating ourselves from the competition in terms of turnaround time, price, and available financial products.

On our motorcycle financing, we charge an average of $32 weekly on each motorcycle, we charge an average interest rate of 34% per year on our fuel, airtime, and smartphone loans. These rates are competitive with commercial banks and 50% cheaper than loan shark alternatives.

To fund our motorcycles for our customers, we partner directly with institutional investors, mostly based in the U.S., investing on USD and local currency (NGN) terms.

We have been able to secure grants from USAID, We have also raised investments from angel investors.