Here Be Dragons was a warning to people that a land was unexplored and could contain dangers as well as treasures.
Its a great name for a venture capital firm and HBD (the acronym based off the legendary sign) has had a successful exit of its Fundamo portfolio company with a $110m sale to credit card supplier Visa. HBD is now managed by PoweredbyVC after being set up by Mark Shuttleworth, the legendary founder of Thawte (digital security sold to VeriSign for about $575m in 1995) and open source advocate.
Also backing South Africa-based lender Fundamo were financial services group Sanlam and conglomerate Remgro (an investment group built off a tobacco business).
Fundamo is base-of-the-pyramid business model tapping into an audience under-banked by traditional financial services firms but mobile and more used to using technology to carry out transactions than many in more developed markets.
The opportunity set is huge and Fundamo has already five million subscribers in 40 countries. After the turmoil of its flotation and shifting corporate venturing and innovation strategy that entailed, therefore, Visa is showing renewed vigour to get back in front of the trends affecting financial services and laying out some strong markers for others to follow.
Visa also has an advantage in being able – through so-called reverse innovation – to use Fundamo to serve customers in other, more developed markets where significant numbers of people fall outside of the traditional lending system, such as the US.
America is catching up to the opportunity with the $17m backing of Prosper.com also last week by a consortium including CompuCredit but much of the excitement in such entrepreneurs will come from the emerging markets. (The July’s innovative region will be on Kenya for those with views about the country please let me know next week.)
The handwringing seen recently about fears of a double-dip recession in Europe and the US or how to pay for pensions and higher standards of living in these countries requires investment domestically as well as buying assets or access to higher growth places round the world and companies have a huge advantage through their balance sheets to do both.
For those brave enough to take on the dragons that lie in emerging markets – in terms of corporate governance and other risks – could reap a golden future.