How FIDO is redefining access to capital
In Ghana and Uganda, the access to credit model is being reshaped. Digital lender FIDO uses AI, alternative data, and a mobile-first design to reach underserved entrepreneurs—many of whom have been excluded from the formal finance ecosystem. With over a million loans disbursed and a growing footprint across Africa, FIDO is proving that inclusive finance can be seamless and transformative.
There’s a revolution taking place in the bustling marketplaces, throughout the agricultural sector, and among streetside vendors in Ghana and Uganda. It’s not new skyscrapers or luxurious housing developments, but rather something far more transformative: equitable, digital access to credit. For millions of micro-entrepreneurs, informal traders, and artisans—such as roadside barbershops in Kampala or pineapple stands in Accra—microcredit can mean the difference between stagnation or growth. And in these two countries, more and more micro-entrepreneurs are getting their loans from one digital lender in particular: FIDO
FIDO started out in 2015 as a brick-and-mortar microfinance institution (MFI) offering loans over mobile phones. The entire business model was done manually and through physical branches: prospecting, underwriting, customer service. But after a few years of operating this model, they realized something needed to change. “We had a good business model,” says Alon Eitan, CEO at FIDO, “but if we wanted to make a significant dent into the credit gap, we realized that our analog distribution model was probably not the way to go.”
Small businesses in Ghana and Uganda are the backbone of the economy; in Ghana, they account for 85% of businesses and contribute around 70% of Ghana’s GDP. In Uganda, they make up 90% of the private sector and contribute 75% to the GDP. MSMEs provide employment opportunities, strengthen financial stability, and indirectly support more jobs for each job they create. Yet, many of these entrepreneurs fall into the Bottom of the Pyramid, unable to access traditional banking services and sometimes even traditional MFIs due to no existing credit history.
“If we wanted to scale, we had to rethink everything,” Alon explains. “Branches were too slow, too expensive, too limited. So we built a fully digital model from the ground up.” Today, FIDO is one of the largest non-banking financial institutions in Ghana, having disbursed over a million loans and serving approximately 400,000 customers in a month. “And while there are other players in the field—and we do welcome the competition and differentiation—I think it’s safe to say we’re the biggest,” he adds.
Alon Eitan CEO at FIDO
“If we wanted to scale, we had to rethink everything. So we built a fully digital model from the ground up for it all.”
loans disbursed
customers in a month
The power of alternative data
FIDO offers several products: credit or lending, savings, a payments portal, and insurance, but the core feature is their credit product. You see, the evolution of FIDO wasn’t only about going digital to reach more customers, it was about transforming how credit decisions are made in the first place. FIDO offers unsecured digital loans processed in real-time, and in a market where most people lack formal financial histories and can’t access traditional financial services, the old-school underwriting models mean little to nothing. FIDO’s answer? Alternative data.
FIDO utilizes an group of 10 proprietary models developed in-house that work in ensemble, with the star of the show being their underwriting technology (FIDO Score), allowing them to instantly underwrite clients based on hundreds of various data indicators. “We use all these data points—like mobile money transactions to behavioral patterns—to assess creditworthiness. It’s not just about how much money someone has in the bank, but about how they behave.”
The result is a system that can approve loan applications in a matter of seconds. Customers simply download the app, take a selfie, scan their ID, and answer some questions. There’s no paperwork, no collateral, no waiting in line.
A model built for inclusion
When doing market research, FIDO discovered that one of the biggest barriers preventing women from achieving access to traditional financial services was having to physically go to the location. Given the amount of bureaucracy and red tape to navigate in banks, the process could often last days, an impossible task for many women running a small kiosk or taking care of children. “We’re able to offer accessibility: not just geographically, but also financially,” Alon says. “You don’t need payslips or a digital financial footprint, nor do you need to spend days waiting in an office, just to receive a loan. For many women, this is invaluable.”
Beyond that, FIDO is cognizant of the possibility of structural bias in their models across various dimensions such as gender, age, or marital status: the bias assessments are baked into their model upkeep and training process, and they compare the model outputs against a control group to ensure the projections are generating accurate and fair results.
The customer base at FIDO is diverse: small-scale farmers, artisans, micro-entrepreneurs, you name it. And there are various reasons why they may take out the loans: to grow their distribution network, buy certain tools, or open a new shop. But what ties many of them together is that 72% of FIDO’s customers use the loans for growth, rather than survival.
Alon gives an example of a nurse he met who used her first FIDO loan to start a fruit and vegetable stall at Makola Market in Accra. Originally, it began as a side gig to earn some extra cash to cover her monthly expenses, and she ended up at FIDO after realizing how unfeasible going to market would be through traditional finance routes. “She’d need to sign a lease, pay at least 12 months upfront, buy stock to get things going, and all this required a lot of funds,” he says. “She went to a bank, and even to a traditional MFI and got declined. She heard about FIDO via word-of-mouth, downloaded the app, and accessed her first loan.” And it’s been a match from the start: since then, she’s taken out over 20 loans, and expanded from just having a stall, to multiple stalls, to over 5 proper shops, allowing her to employ people in her local community.
But with great power comes great responsibility: as a rapidly-growing company, the risk of pushing customers into unsustainable debt cycles and becoming over-indebted cannot be ignored. Alon: “We’ve spent a lot of time ensuring our model is responsible, so much so that it specifically focuses on trying to eliminate over-indebtedness.” To that end, their models include built-in safeguards to prevent customers from borrowing beyond their means. Debt-to-income ratios are calculated using behavioral and transactional data, and customers must repay existing loans before taking new ones. On top of that, there are also mandatory cooling-off periods between loans. “We don’t allow rollovers or refinancing,” he emphasizes. “There’s only one way to get another loan: to pay off the previous one.”
"We don’t allow rollovers or refinancing. There’s only one way to get another loan: to pay off the previous one.”
Beyond Finance
While the core product of FIDO is their credit module, their support goes beyond that. Many customers in Ghana and Uganda operate in agriculture and informal trade—sectors vulnerable to climate shocks. Resilience therefore needs to be a given, but having flexibility to aftershocks is something FIDO noticed is hard to do when their customers live paycheck to paycheck. “That’s why we directly embed insurance into our loan products at no extra costs to the customer. We saw that insurance penetration in our markets was low: people don’t intuitively understand why they might need it. And given the difficulty of sufficiently educating an entire market on its benefits, we thought: why not just automatically embed it into all our products?” Today, they offer a range of insurance products, including life insurance, injury coverage, and climate-related protections like flood and fire insurance—and have already seen how it has paid off.
Alon recalls the deadly Kantamanto Market fires of January 2025, which irrevocably eradicated the livelihoods of thousands of people in a few hours. “For a lot of people, this would be impossible to bounce back from,” he says. “But for our clients, they were able to recover and have some of their losses covered, allowing them to keep working.”
There are other long-term, less obvious benefits FIDO’s once-underbanked clients can tap into as well, with perhaps the biggest one being getting a step up into entering the formal financial system. Through FIDO, they’re able to create a digital footprint, build their credit score, and receive actionable insights on how to improve it in the long run. FIDO also offers financial literacy information tailored to the various levels of understanding in their markets, as well as monthly physical events and webinars on a range of topics like using Excel, creating a budget, and more. “We’re in it for the long run, basically,” Alon says.
Scaling with Purpose
In 2024, FIDO received US$30 mln in Series B debt-equity funding, of which US$10 mln in equity was provided via FMO through its MASSIF fund, the financial inclusion fund that FMO manages on behalf of the Dutch government. The funding has allowed FIDO to grow its business loan product, which offers larger ticket sizes and longer tenors to registered businesses.
But there is one thing that Alon particularly is focused on reaching through FIDO. “We really want to replicate the success we’ve seen in Ghana and Uganda in new markets, which we’ll be doing very shortly,” he says. “We see so many places where these services are still very much needed.” By doing so, Alon hopes that they’ll be able to achieve what his version of success looks like, which would be a much smaller credit gap—or better yet, none at all. For Alon, seeing a thriving ecosystem of small businesses across Africa growing and flourishing is the ideal endgame. Because, as he says earlier in the interview, “Their success is our success.”
This begs the question: just what has helped get FIDO to where they are today? “I think our strong point is that we focus on what we do best, and that’s credit-related tech,” Alon continues. “That also means we realize where it’s best to tap into what our partners have to offer.” One example is their partnership with Access Bank, also an FMO client, through which FIDO offers its savings products to its customers. “And I think it’s important to start with a small problem, the smallest one possible. A lot of entrepreneurs try to solve an unmanageably large problem when they start out, and that can lead to failure.”
All that said, there’s still a way to go before the market is anywhere near Alon’s dream of success for financial inclusion across Africa. There’s a clear need for more access to capital and improving the (digital) infrastructure to provide more reliable data to underwrite future loans. “We still see a huge credit gap in the market, and we’re only scratching the surface. But with the right ecosystem of partners, which includes FMO, we can keep going farther and doing much more.”
And if FIDO’s journey is any indication, the future of finance in Africa is not just digital—it’s also deeply intelligent and inclusive.
“With the right ecosystem of partners, which includes FMO, we can keep going farther and doing much more.”