Jeff App is Latvian technology doing something most Western fintech companies never attempt: creating digital transparency for emerging markets credit & other financial products. Not optimizing existing infrastructure. Building it. The company operates across Vietnam, Philippines, India, and Latin America, using alternative data sources to help navigate the ways of financial services for people who’ve never had a traditional credit history.
That matters because emerging markets are sitting on a massive gap. Millions of people with no credit file. No access to capital. No path into formal lending, even though they’ve proven they can manage money.
Toms Niparts, the founder, didn’t set out to solve this problem. He built a peer-to-peer investment marketplace in Spain in 2015, in those early days of European fintech when Mintos and Antunio were still proving the model worked. He was young, ambitious, certain he understood how lending should work. The idea was elegant: connect people with money to people who needed it.
Then the platform’s parent company, along with lending arms under same umbrella got acquired. New owners arrived with a completely different scale – well beyond developed economies & deep into the wild, challenging emerging markets Niparts found himself involved with lending operations across three continents before he was in his mid-20s. Spain, Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia, India, Latin America – exposure to all said regions in one way or another. He was too young to know what he didn’t know. Young enough to see things clearly.
That’s where he saw the gap.
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Europe had spent decades building credit files. Centuries, really. Banks could pull your history. Payment records. Employment history. Tax returns. Credit cards. Loan repayments. The full picture. Everything you’d ever borrowed and paid back. You borrowed money, you paid it back, you built reputation. Reputation was capital. Your past determined your future.
Emerging markets had none of that infrastructure. No decades of accumulated records. No standardized credit bureaus. Banks couldn’t see who was trustworthy and who wasn’t for an absolute majority of the working adults. They had no proof of anything. So they did what risk-averse institutions always do when they can’t see the data: they pulled back. They lent to the rich, to people with collateral, to people with family connections. People who didn’t need the money but could borrow it anyway. They didn’t lend to the people building something from nothing. The ones with hustle but no history. The entrepreneurs with ideas but no track record. The small business owners without rich parents.
“The credit file is the most important piece of infrastructure in financial services,” Niparts told me. “Without it, you can’t build a lending market. And in emerging markets, those files simply don’t exist.”
That observation became Jeff App.
The mission is to build a transparent, digital, unbiased financial comparison platform that takes into account all available data when matching people with products.. Not just traditional bank records, because it is not about thick vs thin file in emerging markets. It is thin vs no file.. Data derived from one’s digital footprint: devices, location, IP, social, telco & more. The data that exists but hasn’t been utilised to its full potential yet. The proof that someone has earned money and transacted with it responsibly, even if they never went to a bank & resorted to alternative means of storage and transacting instead.
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Jeff does not just connect people with financial products. Its platform goes the extra mile, evaluating every applicant & pre-scoring them before connecting with suitable products, while also giving financial service providers the opportunity to obtain additional insights, enhancing their decision-making through digital and alternative footprint.
But the real insight isn’t the business model. Business models are easy. It’s what drove it. The biggest bottleneck in emerging market finance isn’t technology or mobile phones or internet access. Those exist now. People in Vietnam and the Philippines have smartphones. They’re online. They’re buying things. They’re managing money. The bottleneck is information. It’s data about who’s trustworthy. It’s the ability to look at someone’s track record and say: this person s a real person, and a person that highly likely will pay you back.
That’s the unfair advantage of the West. Not innovation. Not intelligence. Access to information. Centuries of accumulated records. Credit bureaus. Regulatory infrastructure built over decades. Banks with historical data stretching back generations. The West has it. Emerging markets don’t. And without it, capital doesn’t flow to the people who actually need it.
“We’re not trying to replace the credit file,” Niparts said. “We’re trying to help creating it. We’re saying, here’s the proof that this person is without ill intent & has been reliable with money in some form. That’s the foundation we build on.”
Most fintech companies in developed markets are optimizing existing systems. They assume the infrastructure is already there and try to make it faster or cheaper. Niparts isn’t doing that. He’s building the system itself, using data most are overlooking. Building credit models in one country is hard. You need data access. You need regulatory approval. You need conservative banks to trust your methodology. Building them across multiple markets is significantly harder. Different countries have different regulations. Some make alternative data risky. Some lenders won’t touch alternative credit scores no matter how good they are. Managing different regulatory regimes, proving your models work, maintaining quality across jurisdictions. That’s not a problem to solve once. That’s a problem to solve over and over, in each market, with each lender.
But Niparts has already done it. He’s navigated emerging market finance at scale, having been involved with 3 continents and about a dozen different countries. He’s seen what happens when you move fast in places where the rulebook is still being written. He’s dealt with regulatory ambiguity, with skeptical partners, with incomplete data. He understands the infrastructure gaps that most of the industry hasn’t even acknowledged. The gaps that Western fintech companies don’t see because they’ve never had to look.
“We’re going to keep building,” he said. “Because the problem is too big to ignore, and everyone else is ignoring it.”
That’s conviction. And that’s rare in emerging market fintech. It’s easy to build payment apps. Thousands of companies do it. It’s hard to build infrastructure that nobody else believes in yet. It’s hard to spend years solving a problem that most of the world doesn’t think is a problem at all. But that’s what Jeff App is doing. And if Niparts is right, it’s the kind of infrastructure that changes how economies work. The kind that unlocks capital for people who should have had access to it decades ago.
