Ideas and beliefs become traditions after being passed down generations. Traditions capture the essence of a culture, understand their needs and aspirations and manifest innovative measures to build and protect community. They are tested by time and potency- they work.
Martin Ijaha was inspired by Sou-Sou, a local Western African savings club tradition to found Neyber. The startup successfully raised over $150 million in funding and evolved to become the UK’s largest employee financial wellbeing platform.
“My mother was a nurse. As I was growing up, she and her colleagues used to have a jar which they would all put cash in every week. At the end of the month, one of them would take the pot of money. This was very common right across Africa. It’s called Sou Sou. Meaning ‘pooling of funds’,” Ijaha explained his inspiration for Neyber.
Growing up, Ijaha’s mother, worked as a nurse and participated in Sou Sou,which loosely translates into pooling of funds. She and her colleagues would help each other save by collecting money in a jar each week. The pot was a form of communal saving and one of them would take the money home at the end of the month. It helped members have an easily accessible rain day fund and borrow at reasonable rates. The remarkable efficacy of this common tradition across Africa would strike Ijaha decades later.
“After leaving Goldman, even during my time at Goldman, I was looking at fintech. At that time it was defined by peer-to-peer lending, which I found interesting but really I thought there were a few fundamental flaws. There wasn’t a real value proposition for borrowers. It was largely targeting those who could already get loans from banks. I didn’t really feel that it was a sufficient solution,” Ijaha said about the process of creating Neyber.
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After spending most of his career as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, Ijaha was looking for a new challenge. He had witnessed the rise of fintechs, especially peer-to-peer lending companies and found them to be lacking. Credit services mainly offered recourse to people who are able to get their loans from banks, leaving many potential customers shorthanded. Ijaha remembered how well Sou Sou worked for his mother and her peers and set out to apply its collective saving and borrowing model in the workplace.
Ijaha, alongside two former investment bankers launched Neyber in 2015. He approached his former headmaster and requested to run a proof of concept at his former school in West London. The headmaster informally agreed to the idea as he was already providing salary advances to teachers.
Neyber began lending money to the staff and found there was a high demand for their services. This successful pilot convinced Police Mutual, the mutual insurance society for the UK police to sign up with the company. They invested in the business and put in place a £50 million debt facility for police officers.
By 2017, Neyber had signed up 400 clients including Asda, Co-op, Bupa, Harrods, police forces and NHS Trusts and had lent around $175 million to their employees. The company received a £115 million (approximately $125 million) debt and equity investment from Goldman Sachs. In just five years, Neyber had managed to garner more than 300,000 active users and over £150 million (approximately $160 million) of total funding.
In 2020, workplace finance platform Salary Finance acquired Neyber. Their combined portfolio included 15% of the Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) 100 companies, establishing the firm as the UK’s largest employee financial wellbeing platform. Salary Finance now serves 500 client partners and reaches three million employees.
The Western African savings club Sou-Sou tradition is driving growth and development, an ocean away from home.
