Uganda-Based Customer Onboarding Platform Laboremus Receives Expansion Funding

Uganda-based B2B FinTech Laboremus, which enables customer onboarding, has gotten funding to help it expand its product offerings, a press release said Friday (May 27).

The companies providing the funding are DOB Equity and FCA Investments.

Laboremus’ work involves a software-as-a-service (SaaS) which helps FinTechs and banks verify customers’ identity to onboard them, getting rid of one of the more cumbersome bottlenecks in helping African customers access credit.

The SaaS solution combines know-your-customer (KYC) data, anti-money laundering checks and customer interaction, all of which lets the industry reach the unbanked more easily.

The new funding will help Laboremus add ID verification and biometric services, customer KYC and AML screening for government registries like business name, phone numbers and more, and more detailed KYC data capture, which will help with account opening through WhatsApp and mobile means.

Timothy Musoke, CEO and co-founder of Laboremus, said: “Access to credit is what stands between the haves and the have-nots in a modern economy.”

According to Marius Koestler, co-founder and chairman of the board, African banks are “the least efficient” in the world and often have trouble offering cost-effective services.

“Meanwhile, new entrants such as FinTechs struggle to scale due to a lack of access to know-your-customer data and the right technology to onboard potential customers at scale,” he said. “Laboremus solves both issues. By helping banks and B2C-FinTechs onboard their customers at a superior client-acquisition cost, Laboremus will achieve its mission of helping financial institutions to provide banking to anyone, anywhere.”

See also: DreamStart Labs, KEIPhone Gift Smartphones to Unbanked Women

There have been numerous efforts by many companies to address the unbanked in the region. PYMNTS wrote that DreamStart, a digital banking tech platform, has teamed with KEIPhone to offer digital banking in the EMEA region for unbanked women.

This will bring free FinTech-enabled smartphones for the women.

With the partnership, every phone distributed by KEIPhone will be preinstalled with the DreamSave app, which “makes informal community banking fast, fun, and easy — even if you’ve never used a smartphone before,” according to DreamStart CEO Wes Wasson.