Running a small business or sole proprietorship is daunting and limited access to capital can make this twice as hard. Businesses require all the assistance they can get and this includes access to quick and hassle-free credit. This is how Float is helping businesses in Africa grow today; easing credit needs with collateral-free revenue advances and giving small and medium African businesses the leverage to pursue growth.
To achieve this, the Float team needed access to their customers' financial accounts to retrieve their financial history in order to assess creditworthiness and make informed underwriting decisions. This led them to Mono.
Speaking with Float's co-founder, Barimah Effah-Adjei, he said, "During onboarding, we prompt our customers to connect their financial accounts to Float. This gives us access to transaction history and statements that allow us to make lending decisions. Our data needs grew, and shortly after we launched, Mono was launched, too. When we switched to using Mono, the integration was super swift, the experience was seamless, the APIs were easy to use, and the return time on data was fast."
As the Float team builds for young businesses across Africa, they take into account the growth that their customers are able to achieve with the credit resources they provide.
"We're proud of the progress made by businesses that partner with us. Last year was incredibly hard, globally, and more so for small businesses in Africa. Despite the downturn, many of our customers shared that their businesses grew because they had access to reliable credit."
Building More with Mono
Now, over a year after its launch, Float is finding more ways to power businesses in Africa.
"One of our philosophies here at Float is that people can do more when given more; more time, more resources. We love to interact with our customers and in doing so, we discover ways to give them more. In financial services, there are lots of varying product ideas and trajectories, but one thing is most important to us and that is making sure we're solving a problem as well as offering immediate value and fast."
"Our most recent effort to create more value for our customers is a new Float feature called Cash Management. While speaking with our customers, we realized that we could build something that allows them to manage their finances better. Many businesses that use Float have multiple bank accounts, and this means that they do not have a consolidated view of balances and transactions across these accounts. They have to check into each account to get this information. With Mono, businesses can link their multiple accounts to Float and view balances, track transactions, and handle reconciliation all in one place. We believe that this product not only delivers more value to our customers, but it allows us to continuously underwrite them better, more closely observe their finances across their accounts in real-time, and use this data to increase or adjust their credit limits."
"The API-powered method of financial data retrieval is fairly new in our climes, so it's important to go with a data provider that has social proof and inspires confidence in users to give consent to sharing their data. As a young business, this makes a lot of difference for us and it's one of our favourite things about using Mono."
The Float team is value-obsessed and focused on creating more financial services that make it easy for entrepreneurs to run and grow their businesses in Africa. To get hassle-free credit and finance management that allows you to grow your business, visit float.africa to get started.
If like Float, you're looking to build better financial experiences for your users by reliably and securely connecting to financial accounts, you can request access to get started with a free ₦2000 worth of API credits or drop us a line at hi@mono.co. Make sure to follow us on Twitter and Instagram to stay in the loop of our latest announcements.
