A Conversation with Austine Abolusoro, CEO of P2Vest, on Navigating Challenges, Redefining Financial Solutions, and Paving the Way for Innovative Growth.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Congratulations once again on your 3rd anniversary in the finance industry, Mr. Austine. Tell us, what are the major challenges in the lending and borrowing space that you have encountered on your journey to 3?
I think the biggest challenge any lender has is the certainty of getting the borrowers to pay back. The biggest change for a borrower is to meet the lenders’ requirements and also get the funds on time.
We continue to solve these challenges in P2Vest. While we do not guarantee 100% recovery of funds, we do promise you won’t run a loss if you are patient on the platform. There may be delays but most borrowers eventually pay back because of the selection criteria and the recovery systems in place,
Q: What vision did you have for P2Vest at its inception and how have you been able to achieve it?
Our vision was and still is to provide financial prosperity through the creation of Peer-To-Peer platforms where we can meet consumers’ needs and remove unnecessary bureaucracies. We started with Lending and have seen some growth and now we are in the insurance space.
Q: What’s a big misconception about P2Vest that has been successfully corrected in the past 3 years?
The big misconception about P2Vest is that we are a lending company. We say NO, we are a technology company that offers a lending product. And now offer Insurance products and tomorrow we may offer a savings product. So we do not want to be known as a lending company but a financial solution provider.
Q: How would you say P2Vest has successfully handled loan lifecycle management in Nigeria?
Loan lifecycle management could be a major task which only begins at the point of pre-qualifications to selection through credit rating, disbursements and then collections. We have paid a lot of attention to Pre-qualifications and Selections.
We believe if you get it right at that stage then collections should be easier. The biggest challenge of any lender has been on collections so what you do before disbursement would indicate what happens at collections.
Being consistent with reminders and using available legal options without breaching people’s privacy has given us some success in collections. But we still have willful defaulters though and we continue to apply the available options.
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Q: What is Insurtech, and what is the motivating factor behind expanding P2Vest into the insurance marketplace?
Insurtech is basically the full application of technology innovations to run an insurance business in a more cost-effective way. Our motivation for going into the Insurance Space is because of the problems we saw there and we would love to be part of the solutions.
The penetration is abysmally low, less than 1%. But it’s a huge market opportunity and in fact a lifesaver. Everyone starting from the regulator wants a change and they are opening things up for other players. We are taking advantage of the new regulatory landscape to make our contributions.
We have built a marketplace where we have about 15 insurance companies now and a variety of products for anyone to buy. We are also making insurance APIs available for those who may want to connect and embed in their products.
Q: What would you call your greatest achievement so far and how would you measure success in peer-to-peer lending, and recently, the insurance space?
Our greatest achievement is the stability of the products we have built and the acceptance by about 300k subscribers. We continue to find ways to simplify access to funds and we are now doing the same in insurance.
Q: How have you been able to maintain credit, and bad debt while keeping your brand identity intact? Because bad debt will always happen in a market such as this.
We employ available legal options. Calls, emails, Credit Bureaus and sometimes even the Police (where we can establish criminal cases) and Courts. What we do not do is breach customers’ privacy.
Q: What is an identifiable insurance claim myth that InsuranceParasol debunks?
The myth is that “Insurance companies do not pay Claims”. We are assuring users that they can get claims in 48 hours based on SLAs with our partners. Insurance companies pay claims in billions every year but people do not understand the process. Our platform helps the subscribers to simplify that process.
Q: What has been the survival strategy for P2Vest seeing that about 90% of startups fail in their early stages?
Our survival strategy has been to effectively manage available resources and find opportunities to generate revenues that will sustain our growth. Sometimes you could seek to grow faster than the resources you have and that may lead to death. That is one of the biggest problems in the industry.
Q: What great strides do you envision P2Vest making in the future?
We are working on new products that should help students access education loans in partnership with Tertiary Institutions. We are also releasing a new InsuranceParasol App that will connect Agents, Brokers, Insurers and the Insured.
Q: You said in a recent interview that P2Vest is trying to integrate insurance into every purchase. Can you shed more light on how you intend to execute this successfully?
We have a Buy-Now-Pay-Later (BNPL) product on our App. When you buy a product through our partners, insurance is bundled on it. We are also making the API available to other players so they can put it on their platforms and eventually, we could embed insurance into various school fees.
Also, some students have interruptions in lectures and exams because they are unable to pay fees on time. We are saying, let P2Vest pay the fees at the beginning of the semester/terms so the schools will have funds on time to run their operations and the students will have uninterrupted activities.
However, the students have to ensure payment of the loan within 6 months. The schools and guardians/parents must also accept the terms of the loans. We already have a Federal University on the platform and others are in the process. To fund this, we are working with some institution lenders, it is not all what P2Vest alone will fund. product and services.
Q: How is your partnership with schools to work in helping students pay upfront their school fees? Will P2Vest be working with lenders to achieve this and how do they intend to recoup this money from the students without overburdening it?
We are partnering with schools to help students pay their fees. We are solving two problems. Schools do not get their funds on time as some students delay payment of school fees
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