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SuperSim, a São Paulo-based microlending startup, has secured $5.6 million in Series B funding through debt financing.
The Brazilian fintech now plans to conduct a Series A funding round by the end of 2020.
SuperSim is aiming to improve the credit market in the country, where concerns have been raised about difficulties consumers experience in securing loans.
Focusing specifically on the lower socioeconomic classes, SuperSim has a financial inclusionary aim to its business, looking to democratise access to financial services.
The process for determining credit worthiness is seen as unnecessarily long, complex and inefficient in Latin American countries.
Loans are offered with repayment periods between four and 12 months with personal possessions, usually a mobile phone, offered as a guarantee. This is common practice in lending to working class borrowers in Brazil and SuperSim president Daniel Shteyn argues that it maximises the acceptance rate.
The Brazilian fintech sector has been attracting healthy investment in recent months, buoyed by the introduction of open banking earlier this year, allowing licensed institutions to share customer data.
The country’s central bank,the Banco Central do Brasil, believes this will promote the emergence of new market players and encourage new business models.
The regulation could indeed be prove a driving force for a firm like SuperSim, with the unlocking of data allowing for greater visibility of customers’ financial history and by extension credit worthiness.
This would help to speed up the assessment process and possibly the acceptance rate.
SuperSim claims it has seen a four-fold increase in it overall loan capacity in just the last four months.
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