Financial Technology
UNITED powers multiple fintech solutions and services to drive financial inclusion in Africa which is the second largest and fastest growing mobile market in the world after China. The mobile sector is a key driver of financial inclusion and economic development in Africa: smartphone sales are forecast to grow an average of 40% a year. The Sub-Saharan African remittance market is $40 billion and over half of all mobile money services in the world are in this region. In 2017, the total value of mobile money transactions topped $5.3 billion in West Africa alone and the reach of this industry was 13 times wider than local banks.
As a venture builder (also called venture studio or startup studio), United Labs leverages an MIT framework and a proprietary venture studio model called N.I.C.E. to build a portfolio of mission-driven fintech companies. We operate a licensed digital money and remittance solution called Yamoney and a core banking system and digital finance platform called INFINITI that powers various mobile financial services such as remittance, microloan and microsaving. Both the Yamoney and INFINITI platforms were built by United Labs, our data science and technology development company that has offices and staff in New York and India.
In 2019, using N.I.C.E., our proprietary venture studio model, United Labs developed INFINITI as a digital finance platform to support financial inclusion in Africa. The platform was then spun off as a separate venture called Infiniti Financial Group. In less than a year of operations, Infiniti Financial Group now has corporate clients in multiple West African countries and has helped include thousands of people from the informal sector in the financial sector, the vast majority of which are female users. These users are small business owners, farmers and fishermen.
United Labs is also building a consumer-facing brand called Yamoney that will enable faster mobile money and remittance services. Read below more details.