The average Nigerian today has about three bank accounts, and most often than not, being able to see all bank balances across means juggling through bank apps, SMS alerts, email notifications. And when things go really bad, you start digging through pages of bank statements. Yet, even with these, it’s difficult to find everything.
It’s worse when you now happen to be an SME with multiple bank accounts. Being able to see all your bank transactions in one in a good place becomes a chore. It’s a very toxic experience for everyone. Absolute mental health issues even for some.
This is also the experience of many humans and businesses all over the world.
Interestingly, this is a problem we believed open banking would solve. Because with open banking, you could authorize a fintech or an app to have access to your bank accounts, allowing you to manage bank information, balances and transactions from one single app or service.
Unfortunately, we’ve been waiting for open banking in Nigeria for years. Worse still, open banking is not even a thing in other African countries. And in those years, the pain that comes from finding financial transactions has only gotten worse. For some people, it’s almost existential as the inability to have a single view of transactions, balances, and financial health could be fatal.
But at Lendsqr, we are constantly solving problems that affect the average African. So we thought to ourselves; why wait years for open banking to go live if there are things we can do to solve these problems now? The madness of scattered transactions is so acute that waiting another 1 year for open banking could mean life and death for some.
We threw many things at the wall to solve this problem
So we sat down and thought of possible ways to solve this problem. We tried screen scraping but that didn’t work well. It wasn’t just elegant enough. We considered using some other proprietary API services available in the market, but they have poor coverage and are too expensive for humans to use.
We threw many things at the wall and at last, one of them stuck.
With all these in mind, we began the experiment. We cobbled a few colleagues and friends, such as Assurdly, together and built it out, finishing in good time.
Google required CASA certification. But for good reasons
Google required that we do some very serious security certifications called CASA that forces those who want to have access to sensitive information such as Google Drive or Gmail. It was annoying and we’ve never done it before. We plugged it in for another 1 month and got it done.
The truth is, what Google asked us to do was good. They needed the assurance that codes that read sensitive information about customers are secure and ethical. We passed that bar. And that friends, is the story of how we built Kolo.
What exactly does Kolo do?
You’re probably wondering, what does Kolo offer me?
At a minimum, it allows you to put all Nigerian bank accounts together and with your permission, it can get transaction data from your emails and SMS and put it all together in an understandable manner. You can view your financial data across banks in one screen.
You can annotate, categorize, and add additional notes to it.
But this is just the beginning.
We have tons of things on the road map
Currently, you can only manage Naira accounts. We’re working towards allowing users to manage all their non-Naira accounts. And then soon, it would be usable for other countries in Africa, starting with Kenya, Ghana, and Rwanda.
Can’t remember you had an account with that bank? Soon you will be able to auto discover bank accounts for you. You’d be surprised to find accounts you created years back and haven’t used in a while. Maybe, there’ll even be an urgent 2k inside the account.
We are working towards adding some additional services that allow you to view your balances online, real-time.
We’re also working towards incorporating your very own AI buddy, that looks at your transactions and gives you insights of how to better manage the money you receive and the money you spend, your very own financial fairy godmother.
These are just a few of the amazing things we have in store for you.
Kolo is still a beta product and a lot could break
Remember, Kolo is still an experiment. What we’ve launched is an MVP. It’s probably going to break a lot. We’d love to have you experiment with us and even try to break it.
So what are you waiting for? Head over to kolo and explore what we have for you. We’re looking forward to your feedback.
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