As many as 2.5 billion people have no access to banking services, and this is where Oradian comes in.
Forbes named them one of the top 5 best fintech startups in Europe. They have attracted over 400,000 users and 200 microfinance institutions. The company is led by a Croat who spent his childhood in South Africa and London, but chose Zagreb as the centre of Oradian’s business operations. Antonio Šeparović started the company with Onyek Adibeli from Nigeria, Julian Oehrlein from Germany and Andrew Mainhart from the USA. The investors are Credo Ventures, Playfair Capital, Day One Capital and Africa Angels Network, reports Poslovni.hr on July 23, 2016.
“If you consider all the financial services in the world, in all their forms and shapes and taking into account all the technology and all the user experience, the entire financial industry actually offers services for only 50 percent of the world population. In other words, only every other person on the financial market is being served, and this is without considering the type and quality of service”, said Šeparović, pointing out that this was one reason why they got into fintech.
“We develop software for microfinance institutions. The world’s 2.5 billion people have no access to banking services such as those that are a standard in Croatia and in the West. A large number of people in Africa do not have a checking account, they cannot do money transfers, and do not have favourable currency exchange rates. They are excluded from the financial world, and this is a big problem. There are already microfinance institutions that are trying to solve it, but they have a lot of their own problems. They do not have software and are not connected so their costs are high, while their efficiency is low. Oradian is trying to help them. We have a software solution for managing their business so that everything is located in the cloud”, explained Šeparović.
Since one of the Oradian co-founders is from Nigeria, this was the logical starting point. “We went to the north of the country and made a deal to launch a three-month pilot project for free. When we were done, not only have we been immediately paid a year in advance, but they were so thrilled that they wanted to pay for our service far more than we ever imagined. They were ready to present to us all their problems in order to make the software even better and to pay even more for it. Since then, we have not lost one customer, which makes me really happy and excited about what is yet to come”, Šeparović concluded.
