The January 2024 Update

We know it’s been a while since you’ve received this update. We got super busy building Oze, and got behind a few months. But January is always a great month for starting new habits – at Oze we are big fans of the fresh start effect (and of behavioral science principles) – so I made a commitment to starting these updates back up. 

Milestones & Achievements 

Since it’s been so long, we’ll use this month to get you up to speed on last year while sharing some specific January wins we are excited about. 

• We switched things up in a big way with our go-to-market strategy. Instead of acquiring SMEs and preparing them for credit, we are acquiring banks and helping them lend to their customers, who we then activate on Oze. This subtle shift has had an enormous impact on our unit economics; each month we earn more per active SME on the app than we spend per SME acquisition.  We’ve also seen a major increase in our top-line revenue in response to this pivot. Our 2023 revenue outperformed 2022 by 13x.
• In line with this strategy shift, we piloted lending with our first major bank in December and got signed off in January for a commercial launch in Rwanda in February. We’ll be sure to share the details in the next update. 
• The business app is still a critical part of our business as active users on the app are on average qualified for 2x larger loans and have a non-performing loans ratio of less than 2%. We released Oze 2.0 which in addition to having a better UX also enabled customers to manage their inventory and sell online. 
• The business app is still a critical part of our business as active users on the app are on average qualified for 2x larger loans and have a non-performing loans ratio of less than 2%. We released Oze 2.0 which in addition to having a better UX also enabled customers to manage their inventory and sell online. 
• We doubled down on a product-led growth strategy and increased activation rates by 5x in the second half of the year. 
• We continued lending to our customers and enabling smaller lenders to lend through the Oze platform and passed a milestone of $500k loans. We did this while maintaining solid performance – none of our cohorts have ever been lossmaking. 

On Deck & Asks

• Oze is currently active in Ghana, Nigeria, Rwanda, Guinea, Lesotho, and Benin. By the end of the H1,  we will be lending with bank partners in these 6 countries and anticipate expanding our lending operations to at least twice as many countries by the year-end. If you have connections with Small Business Bankers at any African banks interested in digitizing their small business lending, please connect us!
• The Oze business app is available for use in every country in Africa and is now available in both English & French! As always, if you know a small business owner who is ready to ditch their ledgers and start making data-driven decisions, send them to Oze. 
• We’ve gotten good at working with development agencies and DFIs to help countries reach small business digitization and financial inclusion goals. We wrapped up a project with UNCDF and started work with the World Bank and the African Development Bank. If you see RFPs around digital financial services and small business digitization, please send them our way. 

We’ll be at the Visa Fintech Accelerator Demo Day and Africa Tech Summit in Nairobi. If you’d like to come to demo day and/or meet up at the event, send me an email and we’ll set it up! Hope to see some of you there. We had a lot to catch up on. In the future, I promise these won’t be as long. If you have any feedback on how this update can be more useful, please share it. Thank you for reading to the end. 

Regards,

Meghan & Dave