Financial startup helps Southeast Asian students stay in school

ErudiFi aims to provide students with affordable financing options by partnering directly with universities to offer subsidised instalment plans

Spotted: Access to affordable tertiary education has been a continual problem in Southeast Asia, where the cost is nearly double the average GDP per capita in some nations. This has led to students facing high-interest rates from traditional financial institutions and limited reach from peer-to-peer lending companies. With the goal of tackling this problem, Singapore-based startup ErudiFi, which have operations in Indonesia and the Philippines, has raised a €4.1 million Series A, co-led by Monk’s Hill Ventures and Qualgro. The startup aims to provide Southeast Asian students with accessible financing options.

ErudiFi currently works with more than 50 accredited universities and vocational schools in Indonesia and the Philippines, where many students have limited financial options, and often have to rely on friends and family, or informal payday lenders who charge high-interest rates. ErudiFi’s solution is to partner with the institutions to offer subsidised instalment plans, with the use of tech to scale up, while costs are kept down. Interest rates and repayment terms vary between institutions, but could conceivably be as low as zero per cent, with a 12 to 24-month repayment term.

Plans have been put into place to use ErudiFi’s Series A to hire for its product and engineering teams and to expand in Indonesia and the Philippines.

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