Kuda Bank

Founded by Babs Ogundeyi, and Musty Mustapha, Kuda Bank is a full-service digital-only bank that enriches lives by helping people live healthier financial lives.

The bank is on a mission to give all Africans on the planet access to the best banking rates at prices they can comfortably afford.

Funding

Kuda bank started this journey to banking every African in Nigeria, about a year ago, with pre-seed funding of $1.2m with Ragnar Meitern as one of the backers in the round.

More recently, the bank has closed a seed round led by Target Global, SBI Investment(formerly a part of soft bank) and a host of others including Entree Capital. The seed round saw the bank raise $10m in seed round funding making it the round the largest seed round in the African Fintech ecosystem ahead of the likes of Paystack, Flutterwave etc.

Since then Kuda Bank has grown to have about 250,000 customers comprising of consumers and small businesses. It now on average processes over $500 million of transactions each month. 

The bank intends to commit the fresh injection of capital to expand services considerably in 2021, fine-tune offerings, build on recent improvements to card production and delivery speed, and launch a product for small and medium-sized businesses.

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Kuda Bank: The Bank of the free

Kuda Bank has dubbed itself as the bank of the free, as it aims to leverage technology to provide most of its services at considerably reduced prices compared to the traditional banks. In achieving this goal Kuda bank has had to define its target market differently to speed up adoption and slowly expand into other markets. The bank also launched several new features to help it achieve this ‘Bank of the free’ status.

Target market

Kuda bank has modelled its services to meet the needs of teenagers, young adults and small businesses.

Africa has an ever-growing young population with the projected explosion in the volume of financial transactions, the bank can’t be more right than now to build a solution to key into this vast opportunity.

Targeting this market comes quite easy as the generation is almost always on their devices and finds it very easy to do anything from there. Social media is a testament to this and

Features

• You can open a bank account within five minutes,
• Customers can do all the KYC in the app
• They don’t charge unnecessary bank charges like card maintenance fees, account maintenance fees etc.
• The bank’s debit card is free and comes 1 to 2 weeks after you open your account
• They charge N10 when you send money unlike other banks which charge N52.50
• Withdrawals are free.
• The maximum amount you can send at once is N250, 000, while your maximum limit for a day is N1million if you have an upgraded account
• You can use their debit cards at over 3000 ATMs in Nigeria

Competition

Piggyvest, cowrywise, and Alat bank are all viable competitions gone ahead of kuda bank and have similar offerings from savings to investing to banking free of charge.

Kuda bank does have some differentiating features such as fraud detection, optimizing their apps to work with lower-end devices and even partnerships with GT Bank and Zenith Bank, Kuda users can make over-the-counter deposits in these traditional institutions to fund their app-based accounts. 

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Conclusion

Kuda Bank has taken a really interesting approach to banking using digital integration as its differentiating factor and addressing the biggest and fastest growing age range in the African population. The future of financial services is digital and the generation that is more receptible to adoption are the young people. Now they have raised funding to add icing to their cake. They seem to have all the pieces.

We look forward to seeing the bank thrive.