Fundity — Banking That Doesn't Need the Internet

The problem

Millions of Nigerians lose the ability to move money the moment their mobile data drops — a dead zone, a bad network day, an exhausted data plan, or simply not being able to afford data at all. Every major digital bank and fintech in Nigeria today assumes a live internet connection for every transaction. When that assumption breaks, the transaction simply doesn't happen.

SMS, by contrast, works almost everywhere a phone gets any signal at all — including places and moments where data doesn't. It's also nearly universal: every phone that can receive a call can receive and send SMS, no smartphone or data plan required for the transport itself.

The solution

Fundity is building the ability to send and receive money entirely over SMS, with zero internet connection required on the sending device. A user already logged into the Fundity app can flip on airplane mode, tap "Offline," enter a recipient, an amount, and their PIN — and complete a real transfer, with confirmation, purely through their phone's SMS capability.

This isn't a gimmick or a fallback UX pattern. It's full authenticated-encryption-grade security (the same class of cryptography, AES-256-GCM, used to protect data in transit for major cloud providers) applied to a transport layer that works when nothing else does.

What's built today (proof of concept)

• A working, end-to-end offline transfer: app encrypts a transfer request, sends it as SMS, our backend decrypts it, verifies the user's PIN, checks their balance, moves the money, and sends a confirmation back — all provable without a live data connection on the sending device.
• Full account authentication: users log in with just a phone number and a one-time code, no password required — the same pattern trusted by every major Nigerian fintech, now paired with the offline transfer capability.
• Production-grade security practices from day one: encrypted payloads, hashed and salted PINs, signed webhooks, rotating session tokens that can be instantly revoked, and rate-limited login codes to prevent abuse.
• A real integration with Termii, a Nigerian SMS aggregator already used by fintechs across the market — not a hypothetical, a working connection with a real account, running live (not sandboxed) in production.
• Deployed, not just running on a laptop during a demo — live at a real, stable production URL since 2026-11-04.

What's next

• End-to-end testing on real devices across Nigeria's major networks (MTN, Airtel, Glo, 9mobile) — proven against test providers so far, not yet against this live deployment on a real SIM.
• Integration with Fundity's live account and balance systems — the one piece of this that isn't code we can write alone; it depends on the main banking backend's own ledger work landing first.
• Evaluation of USSD as a complementary or alternative transport for the highest-security transaction types, alongside SMS.

Why this isn't just a demo

The natural first reaction to any live product walkthrough is skepticism: is this actually working, or is it a script running behind the curtain? Here's what to look for, because it's genuinely there:

• The SMS itself is unreadable. Open the sent message on the phone. It's not a plain-language instruction — it's authenticated-encryption ciphertext (AES-256-GCM), the same class of cryptography used to protect data in transit for major cloud providers. There's nothing to fake here without actually implementing the encryption.
• The network call is real and verifiable. The transfer is triggered by an actual SMS aggregator (Termii) calling our backend over the public internet, with a cryptographic signature (HMAC-SHA512) our server checks before it will even look at the message — a forged or replayed call is rejected outright, provably, in the server logs.
• The balance change is a real database transaction, not a UI animation — one account's balance decreases and another's increases, atomically, with a generated reference number, visible in real time in the backend logs the moment the phone sends.
• The amount is chosen live, on the spot, by whoever is holding the phone — not pre-set, not scripted.

The one honest gap, stated plainly: the two accounts moving money in this demo live in Fundity's own test ledger — they are not yet connected to a real customer's bank account or wallet. Building that connection safely (KYC, real account provisioning, reconciliation with a real balance system) is the next phase of work, not a research risk — the hard, novel part (moving value reliably and securely with zero internet, over the one channel that works when data doesn't) is what's proven here, live, today. That connection work is precisely what this round funds.

Why this matters for the market

Nigeria has one of the world's largest populations of mobile users without reliable, continuous data access, and one of the fastest-growing digital banking markets in Africa. A transfer method that keeps working when data doesn't is a genuine differentiator — not an edge case, but a real answer to a problem every one of Fundity's competitors currently leaves unsolved.