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FarmDrive is a Kenyan ¬based social enterprise that is unlocking access to financial services for over 50 million smallholder farmers in Africa. Using simple mobile phone technology, alternative data sets, and sophisticated data analytics, FarmDrive is closing the critical information gap that keeps smallholder farmers from getting loans that would allow them to grow and diversify their businesses. Potentially creditworthy smallholder farmers are often denied loans because they lack the traditional credit profiles that lenders rely on to evaluate borrowers.FarmDrive bridges the funding gap between smallholder farmers and financial institutions in two ways. The first step is to bring together multiple streams of data to create yield-predictive agronomic algorithms specific to each farming vertical and geographical region. T hese streams of data can be classified into three categories: 1. Agronomic Data: crop portfolio, soil health, drainage, weeds, pests, etc. 2. Remote Sensing Data: vegetation, weather conditions, climate trends, etc. 3. Market Data: offtake security, price trends, etc. FarmDrive then creates credit profiles for farmers by combining the agronomic algorithm with behavioral data. The behavioral data is obtained from farmers through a simple SMS/Android mobile phone application. With this application, Farmers can track their revenues and expenses, and also send demographic information to FarmDrive.

“The digital nature of the product can be seen as exacerbating the usual challenges of ICT illiteracy. However, FarmDrive presents the record-keeping platform in different languages  – it’s now available in English and Kiswahili – via a simple SMS to increase the uptake of record-keeping among rural farmers. So farmers don’t have to have a smartphone,” Bosire says.“It also emerged during our pilot that farmers feel more empowered if they can their mobile phones for other activities apart from for calling, texting and mobile money. Their openness to  embracing new ways of using their simple mobile phones to solve challenges is what drives the culture shift from keeping non-organized farm records on paper or none at all  to digital record keeping,” she says.

It is estimated that the Agricultural sector in Africa contributes over 40 percent of GDP but receives less than 4 percent bank lending because of inadequate personal assets. The dynamic duo through FarmDrive have thus built a platform for smallholder farmers who didn’t have financial identities before to enable them access loans easily.

WorldRemit, on the other hand, partners with local banks and mobile networks; in Kenya, for example, it is working with electronic wallet service M-Pesa, so that money can be transferred instantly to all customers. The recipient can retrieve the funds as a bank deposit into a local WorldRemit bank account, as mobile money, airtime top-up or as cash at a supermarket. The fees are two to three per cent lower than those charged by most banks. WorldRemit’s closest rival is Remitly, another digital-only company that specialises in sending money from developed countries to the developing world.

Scott Eddington, WorldRemit’s Managing Director for Asia Pacific, said: "We are proud of our history of helping customers send money back home to friends and family in the Pacific Islands, and this new partnership with Digicel will strengthen our offering and give even more choice to consumers. It couldn’t come at a better time – travel restrictions continue to impact on tourism and the movement of seasonal workers, and COVID-19 has created a step-change shift in consumer behaviour towards digital options such as mobile wallets."

“The importance of remittances to Jamaican residents has risen consistently for over 30 years. Our partnership with JMMB Money Transfer, a trusted and valued partner in the region, will enable us to offer WorldRemit customers more choice, while supporting the transition from offline remittances to safer, faster and lower cost online money transfer options.”

WorldRemit is just one of many different money transfer services that have become increasingly popular, especially since coronavirus has taken hold. Money transfer services are perfect for moving funds around, and thanks to quite a lot of competition they're now a relatively cheap and easy way of getting the job done. WorldRemit was set up in 2010, is headquartered in London and sits in the same marketplace as the likes of Azimo, Transferwise, CurrencyFair, Lebara Money Transfer, PayPal, Zelle and other competitors.

“Know Your Customer” - or KYC - is a verification process in the financial industry. If you have ever opened a bank account or applied for insurance, then you have been a subject to KYC checks. All regulated financial companies are responsible for building their KYC checks based on global and national anti-money laundering standards. This way, companies can make sure that it’s a suitable verification process for their customers, services and industry. If customers can’t provide any formal identification, or if it is difficult to authenticate it, companies can’t easily identify them and offer them their services. 

“Egypt needs fintech, specifically after the success story of Fawry, since our financial markets are not properly regulated at the level of payments and e-commerce – all of it is more informal, so any solutions would boom,” Sharara says.

MoneyFellows, an Egyptian startup incubated in London, marries technology with traditional money circles to help people save and borrow through their social networks. Like many other startups, MoneyFellows has to work with commercial banks because the Egyptian government has strict regulations about institutions that can look after customers’ deposits.

SimbaPay uses advanced security technology and leading global partners to ensure the safety and security of your data and transaction

Founded in 2015, AgroCenta is an online sales solution for smallholder farmers, with two offerings – supply chain platform AgroTrade, and financial inclusion service AgroPay.

Disrupt Africa reported yesterday AgroCenta was one of six African startups awarded non-equity funding by the GSMA Ecosystem Accelerator. Though the startup’s co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) Francis Obirikorang declined to disclose the breakdown of equity versus grant cash, Disrupt Africa can confirm that the GSMA input is worth around US$250,000. Obirikorang said the funds will be used to scale up AgroCenta’s operations in Ghana, while the GSMA grant is more specifically geared towards the AgroPay platform, which provides any smallholder farmer who has traded using AgroTrade with a financial statement they can use to get access to finance.

Send money to recipients in these countries ASIA: China, IndiaEUROPE: Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, United Kingdom, Portugal, Spain, TurkeyAFRICA: Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, MadagascarCOMING SOON: Canada, USA & Australia among other countries

“When you look at the in­ter­net bank­ing ser­vices avail­able at the mo­ment, it is very ex­pen­sive to just log in and check one’s bal­ance,” said Mr Nchai.“Also, most of the mo­bile money ser­vices are not user friendly. So our aim is to sim­plify life for our clients with dif­fer­ent prod­ucts.“We aim to pro­vide our ser­vices to in­di­vid­u­als, in­sti­tu­tions, or­gan­i­sa­tions, multi-in­dus­try sec­tors and gov­ern­ments with a cut­ting edge, fresh and in­no­va­tive fi­nan­cial management sys­tem in this ever chang­ing world.”

Cloud eliminates many data storage management problems that plague dated enterprise infrastructure. Cloud computing in banking offers easy access to data for regulatory reporting, risk mitigation, analytics, deep learning, and discovering risk management anomalies.

Cloud based financial services can scale to meet variable and increasing data volume. Plus clean, consolidated, contextualized data eliminates the blinders caused by data silos. Additionally, on-premise grids typically force banks to allocate compute resources while cloud resources are available on-demand.

Open banking promotes banking and payments technology standardization, drives competition, enhances security of customer account data, and leads to data use innovation. APIs simplify the way financial institutions collect actionable data (e.g. customer purchasing, loan needs, preferred journey patterns, risk profiles, and future income projections).

JUMO partnered with Uber to create JUMO Drive, a first-of-its-kind digital vehicle asset finance product for rideshare drivers.

JUMO partnered with Telenor and Telenor Microfinance bank to launch the first commercial product in Asia.

The first funding partner was introduced to the operating platform. JUMO’s partnership with Letshego Bank in Ghana enabled payment and capital providers to work together to build products.

The digital transformation and e-payments company Fawry became the first listed tech company in Egypt with a market capitalisation of $1 billion last week. At the end of trading on 17 August, the market value of the company had jumped to LE15.56 billion (around $1 billion), meaning it is now rubbing shoulders with the likes of CIB (Egypt), QNB Al-Ahli, the Eastern Company, the Abu Qir Fertilisers Company, Telecom Egypt, and Al-Sewedy Electric in the EGX index billionaires’ club.

In July 2018, Start-Up Nation Central hosted a delegation from Cassava Fintech, Africa who are leading Africa’s Fintech Transformation Revolution. Cassava Fintech provide inclusive access to digital financial services across Africa, helping drive financial inclusion, digital payments and the adoption of mobile e-commerce.

Two thirds of the African population work in agriculture, yet just 1% of commercial loans go to the sector, and very few of these are allocated to smallholder farmers. Kenyan company FarmDrive is using data from ESA's Food Security Thematic Exploitation Platform (TEP) to help smallholder farmers access the funds they need.