Before Mida had a name, it existed as three separate ideas inside Renmoney, a Nigerian digital microfinance bank, where its three founders worked as colleagues, each unknowingly trying to solve the same problem.
Mayowa Anibaba, Okeroghene Egbi, and Adija Uzodinma held senior leadership roles at the lender. Anibaba led engineering, Egbi headed product and marketing, and Uzodinma oversaw IT and operations. They called themselves “the trio.”
From their respective roles, they saw the same weakness in digital lending. A lender could streamline the onboarding process, automate credit checks, and approve loans within minutes. But unless borrowers repaid those loans, none of those efficiencies mattered.
As they spoke with lenders beyond Renmoney, they realised the problem extended well beyond a single institution. Anibaba, who had begun consulting for other lending businesses, found that many were grappling with the same challenge: recovering overdue loans.
The trio officially left Renmoney within months of one another in 2023. In November that year, they launched Mida, a startup that builds software and recovery services for lenders, including debt collection, borrower onboarding and loan recovery tools.
The opportunity was significant. Nigeria’s digital lending market is estimated to be worth $2.1 billion, while the number of licensed digital lenders grew from 173 in April 2023 to 461 by August 2025. However, as more Nigerians borrowed through digital platforms, defaults also increased. The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN)’s Q2 2025 Credit Conditions Survey reported rising default rates across both secured and unsecured lending. For Mida, the gap between issuing loans and recovering them represented a business opportunity.
Day 1: An experiment becomes a…
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Read Full Article by Opeyemi Kareem at techcabal.com
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