Yara Technologies enters African market, targets rapidly-growing FinTech market

Thursday, 1 February 2024 00:06 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

From left: Yara Technologies Delivery Manager Ranga de Silva, Meus Technologies Zambia Managing Director Danny Luswili, Yara Technologies CEO Chaminda V. Silva, and Director – Operations Tiasha Silva

Yara Technologies (Yara), Sri Lanka’s premier EdFinTech company, expanded into the African market by partnering with Meus Technologies, Zambia (Meus).

This move is strategically aligned with Africa’s rapidly growing FinTech landscape, presenting significant opportunities for Yara to enhance access to capital, especially for the expanding middle class. The company expects the FinTech adoption to be propelled by the enhancing mobile penetration, rising demand for capital among students, employees and the growing entrepreneurs/SME segment. Currently, in Zambia, the combined consumer loan and educational loan market is close to $ 3 billion per annum, and the collaboration expects to make healthy inroads in this market.

Yara’s FinTech Loan aggregator platform connects users from onboarded partner institutions with partner financial institutions to facilitate loan requests. A user may request facilities such as educational loans, mortgage loans, personal loans, leasing facilities and/or credit cards from multiple financial institutions simultaneously.

The value proposition of the platform includes easy access (digitally) to multiple financial institutions, comparison tables to help users select suitable financial product/s, and get a loan in three simple steps (online request form, connect with multiple banks, get the loan) and obtain attractive terms.

Six financial institutions have partnered across Sri Lanka and Zambia, with over 25 institutions adopting the platform globally, including renowned global educational bodies such as CFA, CIMA, and ACCA. Yara expects the strong network of partners and the growing reach to propel the platform’s growth in facilitating loans across different sectors.

“We are delighted to partner with Meus Technologies in the African market. This partnership would facilitate higher access to capital for the growing middle class in Zambia. Further, our AI-based technology tools enable financial institutions to generate revenue at a lower sales acquisition cost and achieve significant efficiencies in their loan origination cycle, including sales acquisition, document management and credit analytics,” stated Yara Technologies CEO Chaminda V. Silva.

“We are equally excited at Meus Technologies with this partnership with Yara Technologies by providing a value-adding, easy to use and cost-effective platform that would benefit students, parents and guardians to access suitable funding for education in Zambia,” stated Meus Technologies Managing Director Danny Luswilli.