MENA : 10th December 2019: Lendo, the Peer-to-peer (P2P) lending marketplace that offers small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to digitally pre-finance their outstanding invoices was launched today, to coincide with Arabnet Riyadh 2019, one of the largest and most disruptive entrepreneurial ecosystem events in the Kingdom.

As an alternative to obtaining short-term finance, Lendo empowers SMEs to enhance cash flows by borrowing money from individual lenders against their outstanding invoices. This makes small business lending simple and decreases the amount of time and effort it takes to secure immediate funding.

The platform provides solutions to two major pain points in the SME finance market. First, the limited options for SME businesses to borrow cash quickly and easily and second, the limited short-term options that offer higher returns for investors/lenders. Lendo is developing an excellent community of creditworthy borrowers and sophisticated investors that enables SMEs and investors to match each other through the P2P model.

Lendo was founded by Osama AlRaee and Mohamed Jawabri. In keeping with Vision 2030, fostering a dynamic SME finance sector was seen as a priority amongst economic development goals. In 2018, the SME lending industry recorded turnover of approximately SAR 412 billion. As founders of Lendo this trend was recognized and together began to develop a platform that would cater to the needs of a vast majority of SME businesses.

Commenting on the launch, Osama Al-Raee, CEO and Co-Founder at Lendo said: “Late payments and lack of working capital/or inadequate cash flows are the main challenges that SMEs face. Comparing the banks to Lendo. Banks only work with six-figure loans that are lengthy in nature while Lendo has spent efforts to bridge that gap and welcome invoices of all amounts. We have the vision of enabling SMEs to fully focus on their growth and lenders to access new market segments that can provide higher returns. We are confident that Lendo will pioneer this space to become the platform of choice for SME Invoice financing.

Lendo is a FinTech Sandbox licensed financial intermediary platform. It leverages a tech stack that brings new innovative solutions to credit and risk assessments by utilizing unconventional data points regarding the borrowers and its state-of-the-art underwriting capabilities and loan servicing capacity.

Mohamed Jawabri, Co-Founder and COO, added: “Current statistics reveal that the Saudi economy and overall industry is undergoing a huge transformation, above all in the SMEs segment. At Lendo, our objective is to position ourselves as a leading supplier of digital financial technology, which will disrupt and revolutionize the SME Invoice financing sector and help play a significant part in shaping this transformation and support the overall Saudi Vision 2030”

Lendo is backed by three remarkable Venture Capital firms in the Middle East and a group of leading Angel investors in the region. The company is geared to become the platform of choice for SMEs lending and borrowing. Furthermore, Lendo is looking forward to further build a robust credit scoring engine that will employ machine learning methods and AI-based underwriting capabilities to pioneer Saudi’s FinTech industry in P2P lending.

Source: magnitt

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