KiaKia is a licensed, entirely-online, direct and P2P lender that uses technology to provide direct personal loans at flexible rates, and also match borrowers with individual or corporate lenders at mutually-agreed rates.
They offer loans from N10,000 and N200,000 for a minimum duration of 7 days and a maximum of 30 days. Responsible borrowers who earn financial responsibility trust points over a period of time will be able to access much bigger amounts at longer tenure and more flexible interest rates. Kiakia’s services are best for anyone looking for an unsecured personal consumer loan, individual’s ineligible for typical bank or credit union loans and those facing financial hardship.
However, aside its numerous products that are void of the usual financial bureaucracy, it also offers easy access capital to SMEs through its ‘Mr. K’, an artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning powered alternative credit scoring, customer service, Direct and P2P lending virtual agent.
Mr. K is targeted at millions of credible individuals and SMEs that are financially underserved in spite of the huge amount of private and corporate monies in the financial systems across Africa with the aim of offering them easy access to credit.
The platform, according to KiaKia, through Mr. K, is:
- Offering one of the most robust financial services virtual assistant around.
- Ushering in a new era of alternative credit scoring and risk assessment, customer service, direct and peer to peer lending.
- Powering its services by data analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence, all on a single platform and through a very friendly interface and end to end user experience.
- Driving down the interest rate for unsecured loans and offering the most competitive interest rates for unsecured loans from between 8 percent to 24 percent for 30 days, depending on the borrower’s KiaKia proprietary credit rating.
- Giving access to 80 percent of its high scoring borrowers the same loans at between 7.5 percent and 15 percent as against the 30 percent of its competitors.
- Offering borrowers duration flexibility in that, a borrower could choose the exact number of days between 7 and 60 days for short-term loans and are charged interest only for such number of days, unlike others who charge flat rates.
- Connecting through its peer-to-peer, credible borrowers with lenders offering loans as low as 5.5 percent interest rate for longer tenured loans, the managing director explained.
Having said these, it should be noted that KiaKia is NOT a bank, and as such does not provide savings and deposit services from the public, and is also not a fund manager.
We are excited about what this new product means for SMEs in Nigeria. What are your thoughts? Share them with us!