David Adeleke’s Zeeh Africa is redefining how Africans access credit facilities

In the past, African society viewed the issue of credit, or to put it crudely, taking a loan, through a negative lens. Most people would rather keep their matters private rather than approach the neighbour down the street and seek to “borrow money.”

Thankfully, the stigma attached to loans is slowly being dropped. The rise of multiple credit companies in Africa has contributed significantly to raising awareness that loans and credit facilities are essential safety nets necessary for economic prosperity.

David Adeleke, the founder and CEO of Zeeh Africa, is now helping to make the whole process easier for parties involved in credit facility acquisition. The company’s platform connects users to trusted identities, consumer financial data, and credit scoring/analytics, all with a single secure ID. This enables clients to access user identities and financial data in real time, which makes customer onboarding faster, less expensive, and more efficient.

Apart from this, the company is going a step further to launch a B2C platform that would now help individuals manage their finances, analyse their financials, know their credit score, recommend a credit facility for them based on the credit score, and issue them a credit card to shop on a buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) basis. This, he said, will liberate Africans and give them an opportunity to have all their needs met in one platform.

“The B2C platform is going to be a personal finance manager. Since we are able to get the data of customers, there will be the possibility of these users linking all their banks together. They will be able to get an analysis and an understanding of what their financials look like. get their credit score and on top of that, we’ll give them a tip on what to do to be able to boost their credit score,” he said.

“Other than just having that personal financial manager that helps you manage your finances, another advantage is that, based on their credit score, we would be able to recommend credit facilities to them and issue a credit card which will be linked to all their banks based on their credit score.”

David Adeleke, CEO and co-founder of Zeeh Africa

David Adeleke says Zeeh Africa emerged to provide solutions that will enable a secure finance ecosystem. According to him, there was an identified need for validation of users’ data and information which provides a useful template for credit facilities to be accessible.

“There is currently no validation for that in the ecosystem that is 100% efficient. So those are the things that actually led to the birth of Zeeh Africa. We thought to leverage open banking, play in the space, and provide a solution to this major challenge that is caught across this credit ecosystem or the financial ecosystem,” Adeleke said.

Other than being the CEO and co-founder of Zeeh, David is a leading investment professional and executive with over 7 years of experience. With a passion for building things from scratch, David is a co-founder, investor and adviser to fast-growing tech and fintech companies like Stakefair (Formally BetDemand), Corva.me, Lubinor, TomXhub, D2Decide, Finakip, Cowryvest.

We sat with David Adeleke in this instalment of Founders Spotlight, and the serial entrepreneur shared insights into the credit space, expansion plans, and his quest to help people create wealth and help the industry thrive by creating opportunities for other players to come in.

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Zeeh Africa’s mission

David was the CEO and Head of Investment at Daxlinks Global LTD, a microlending platform, before founding Zeeh Africa. He asserts that one of the many challenges they encountered was the lack of access to current and accurate information. He claims that despite borrowers frequently falsifying information and defaulting on loans, institutions were unable to fully verify their claims.

On Zeeh Africa’s unique market proposition, he says:

“The goal is basically to make credit companies make smart decisions while lending. It’s currently unique because basically, we are leveraging almost all the modern sophisticated IT that we could find here, to be specific, AI and machine learning.

For instance, our Zeeh insight is designed to provide credit scores and creditworthiness for users. For example, if a customer is onboarded on our platform and we’ve got in your data, we take it a step further by analyzing your information through a data point that ranges between account activity.“

So that makes us unique in the sense that we are offering three core products. One is the KYC second is the connect and third is the insight and we’re making all this into one package.

Solving theft and fraud in the industry

According to Statista, in 2019, 1.7 thousand males and 337 females were arrested in Nigeria for advance fee fraud. Moreover, 878 males and 73 females were arrested for cyber crimes. Also, Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS) industry fraud report revealed that Nigerian financial services companies lost ₦5.2 billion to fraud between January and September 2020.

Just recently, some fintech companies like MTN, Flutterwave and Patricia recorded huge losses due to several attacks perpetrated by hackers and fraudsters. The issue of cybercrime continues to be a major challenge in the African fintech ecosystem.

David says to solve the issue of fraud and theft, the platform is leveraging its KYC feature and product. “We have this system that we call the OCR which is more like a facial recognition system”, he says.

“So for example, you’re building a platform and you want to do KYC on your customer because one of the major things that were uprising last year was the fact that people created ghost accounts or took other people’s identity to create an account on loan platforms. They also find ways to use different bank details, collect money and let the companies go after the wrong people“, he added.

So with a robust KYC system like the one we have in Zeeh Africa, the user takes a selfie of himself and we match that image taken by that user with probably the image the person operated in his BVN, NIN or international passport or any of the government issued ID card to the person we provide them.

David Adeleke, CEO and co-founder, Zeeh Africa

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Click on the link to get the complete interview: