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Artificial intelligence technologies are permeating financial services sectors around the world. The application of these technologies in emerging markets allows financial service providers to further automate their business processes and to leverage new and big data sources to overcome obstacles, including the high cost of serving rural and low-income customers and establishing customer identity and creditworthiness, that prevent the delivery of financial services to many consumers.

South Africa-based financial technology firm JUMO plans to expand in high-growth Asian markets after securing the backing of Goldman Sachs GS.N in an equity funding round, the company's chief executive said.

Since its founding in 2014, JUMO, which helps individuals and small businesses access savings and credit products through their mobile devices, has mainly focused on Africa where the adoption of mobile money has transformed the banking landscape.

JUMO uses behavioural data such as mobile telephone use to help financial services providers and mobile network operators assess lending risk and tailor financial products to those living in developing countries where credit information is scarce.

Get the ability to provide banking services to people who were previously unreachable, thanks to a lower cost of risk and the ability to accurately predict future behaviour.

Unlock the value of individuals’ digital footprints and power a generation of entrepreneurs, small businesses and communities with real financial choice.

Credit Our lending products give entrepreneurs quick access to funds or asset finance. The loan amount, life cycle and repayment method can be configured to fit the needs of the individual. Savings JUMO builds and operates short-term, structured and long-term savings products that bear interest. They’re available to anyone who needs a safe place to store and grow their money. Insurance JUMO is able to work with underwriters and insurers to create standalone or wrapped insurance products to safeguard incomes, families, assets and businesses, no matter how small. Points We’re developing a white label points programme that can be used as a tool to drive and incentivise mobile transactions and empower people to build a personal, digital financial profile.

M-Pesa was launched in 2007, and it’s still going strong. The concept of a phone-based money transfer service originated back in 2002, when researchers realized the popularity of the market for phone airtime — individuals in a handful of African nations often transferred it to friends and family for subsequent use or resale.

When M-Pesa (launched by Safaricom) made its debut a few years later, it had initially been conceived as a solution for microfinancing — allowing institutions to distribute and collect loan payments without the hassle of cash. However, during this pilot, its widespread adoption in a myriad of alternative use cases caused the company to reconsider and relaunch with a focus on ensuring individuals could send money to their families and execute payments.

This funding was secured from UK charity Shell Foundation, the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), AV Ventures and Rabo Foundation. “This is a significant milestone for AgroCenta, having the support of leading institutions, particularly with the COVID-19 backdrop, underlining the strength of AgroCenta and the importance of its mission. The demand for agricultural raw materials from offtakers in the brewery, manufacturing and consumer sector is increasing exponentially because of the easing of the COVID-19 restrictions that were put in place by the government of Ghana, hence this capital injection will help to secure purchases at fair and transparent prices from smallholders — a much needed lifeline for many who are at the proverbial bottom of the pyramid”. Francis Obirikorang, AgroCenta’s CEO and Co-Founder Michael Ocansey said while highlighting the importance and criticality of this investment.

“Our mission goes beyond proving affordable access to energy,” Michael Tesfaye Hiruy, the companies Chief Strategy Officer told The Reporter. “Moving forward, we will forge the necessary partnerships to provide access to connectivity and digital services such as healthcare, education, market access and employment”.

Automated financial advising (robo-advising) has become an established practice in wealth management, yet very few studies have looked at the cross-section of the robo-advisors and the factors explaining the persistent variability in their portfolio allocation recommendations. Using a sample of 53 advising platforms from the US and Germany, we show that the underlying algorithms manage to identify different risk profiles, although substantial variability is evident even within the same investor types' groups. The robo-advisor expertise in a particular asset class seems to play a significant role, as does the geographical location, while the breadth of the offered investment choice (number of portfolios) across the robo-advisors under study does not seem to have an effect.

Kiva is a non-profit lending platform well known for its microloan service targeted underserved markets globally. Lendio states that the program has now provided over $500,000 in microloans to business owners worldwide, 98% of whom are female. Lendio first launched the program in 2016. The company describes the program as part of its commitment to entrepreneurship and inclusivity. Lendio provides a microloan to a low-income entrepreneur for every new loan facilitated on its marketplace platform. This voluntary employee-contributed, employer-matched program reports a 94% participation rate among Lendio employees.

Most smallholder Kenyan farmers are excluded from the financial system because they do not have a satisfactory credit profile. Without access to formal credit systems, they use alternative systems providing credit at high-interest rates, which, in addition, are not well suited to support their farm and off-farm activities.Having done this, the FarmDrive team met banks and organisations financing smallholder farmers to better understand the reasons for exclusion. They discovered that it is often the lack of information that locks farmers out of the financial system. They decided to try to fill this gap by collecting information from farmers, and analysing the data obtained, establishing their credit profile. Once this is done, farmers can apply for a loan via the platform FarmDrive.

African smallholder farmers face a recurring problem of access to finance and credit. Financial institutions, for their part, do not have access to many potential customers, considered as too risky. Young Kenyan computer scientists have developed FarmDrive, an application that aims to promote access to credit and financial services for smallholder farmers. banks remain to be won over, but the project is on track.

Pula says it provides farmers with insurance bundled with inputs (such as seeds and fertiliser) and farmer advisory services to help increase their yields and boost (and protect) their income. “In our five years since launching, we’ve built strong traction for our products. However, the fact remains that across Africa and other emerging markets, there are still millions of smallholder farmers with risks to their livelihoods that have not been covered,” says Goslinga. Insurance is unpopular in Africa, with the continent’s insurance penetration estimated to be 2.8% in 2017. Insurance penetration is particularly low in the agricultural sector, and convincing farmers to buy insurance during favourable seasons is difficult.

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 reaches 15 million customers across Africa and Asia

JUMO has disbursed over USD 1.6 billion in funding and is growing its base of savings products. “By empowering MSMEs, we’re also positively impacting communities, families and employees. Technology is removing barriers to financial inclusion making it possible to responsibly provide everyone with access to good financial choices,” Watkins-Ball added.

“We are working to connect every entrepreneur to the financial products they need to grow and prosper,” says Watkins-Ball. “Our technology enables our partner banks and payments companies to help millions of underserved people access financial services.”

Nigerian fintech firm Carbon — an early-stage financial services startup based in Lagos — has posted on its website financials audited by KPMG.This comes four months after the company obtained a credit rating as a pre-IPO venture. Carbon — which recently rebranded its OneFi holding company and PayLater product titles into one name — plans to continue releasing its financial results on an annual basis, co-founder and CEO Chijioke Dozie told TechCrunch.This may not be totally unheard of in other global tech markets, but for startups in Africa’s big tech hubs — such as Nigeria — it’s a rarity.One of the first glimpses into startup financials in Nigeria came when Jumia shareholder Rocket Internet went public in 2014, which required it to include limited Jumia data in its annual report. The accompanying prospectus to Jumia’s listing this year on the New York Stock Exchange offered the most expansive financial data to date on a tech venture operating in Africa.Prior to this — and still for the most part — companies in the continent’s (mostly) pre-public (earlier-stage) startup hubs — such as Nigeria — provide little to no financial performance info.“Typically, in the local market, we have not seen a lot of voluntary transparency or the availability of data,” said Lexi Novitske — a Lagos-based VC investor at Acuity Venture Partners.“Most startups are concerned such disclosure could expose losses, give market intel to competitors or attract unwanted attention from regulators. It could also lead to negative negotiation leverage if partners saw that they were making good returns.”So why’d Carbon go to the trouble of putting its pre-public accounting out in the open for anyone to see?

Clients and recruiting were two reasons. “From a customer perspective, we are trying to get people to trust us with their financial services…so they can see this is the institution I’m dealing with and this is their financial position,” explained Carbon’s Dozie.Carbon has evolved from its original focus as an online lender to offer a broader array of mobile-based financial services — including payments, investment products, credit reports and business banking services. In March, the company acquired Nigerian payment solutions company Amplify for an undisclosed amount.By stats offered by Briter Bridges and a 2018 WeeTracker survey, fintech now receives the bulk of VC capital and deal-flow to African startups, many of which are attempting to reach the continent’s large unbanked and underbanked populations.Carbon fits into that category and its CEO believes being upfront about the startup’s financial position will attract top talent. “From a recruitment perspective, we want recruits to know we have good prospects — that this is a company that’s doing well and wants to keep doing well,” said Dozie.That impression is buoyed by Carbon’s initial results, which were fairly positive for a Series A-stage startup. The company had revenues in 2018 of $10 million, according to its online annual report, and turned a profit of around $500,000.It’s helped with recruiting interest, according to Dozie, who said he’d marked an increase in candidates inquiring about open positions since the results were posted.

we don’t get considered because investors don’t really think that you can get the results or this performance in the markets that we’re in,” he added — noting that Carbon has operations in Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa and is considering expansion in Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, DRC and Egypt.Investor Lexi Novitske thinks Carbon offering financial performance data is a good thing for Africa’s tech ecosystem. “The move builds trust from clients, partners or investors in a market where there is not a lot of openness,” she said. “I am encouraged to see how other companies will react. My hope is that more will openly report their own metrics…”Dozie says the company will continue to post audited financials on an annual basis, even if they show losses. If the startup continues to expand, attract capital and talent and grow revenues, other Nigerian fintech firms may follow suit.

In 2012, two brothers, Chijioke Dozie and Ngozi Dozie, founded Carbon, a Nigerian digital bank start-up. Carbon began as a digital lending company, but now the company provides a variety of services, from payments to savings to investments. According to Dozie, “Our annual report will be released in the second quarter after our financial audit is complete, to gain customer trust, Chijioke Dozie, the CEO, told ProWellTech in 2019 that the company will make Carbon’s financials public.” If you note, before we published the 2019 fiscal year update, we released a year under review in January 2020.Gross profits, profit or loss before and after tax, liabilities and equity, total assets, etc. are included in Carbon’s annual report. Carbon’s year of analysis reveals processed payments, client base, disbursed loans, and investments made on the platform. The business with about 659,000 customers processed N96.54 billion (~$241.35 million) according to Carbon’s year of analysis for fiscal year 2020, which is up 89 percent compared to the same period a year earlier. N25.51 billion (~$63 million) was the disbursement volume for its lending arm, an improvement of 9.1 percent from the 2019 financial year. Investments worth N13.02 billion (~32.55 million) were made on the site, up by 365 percent from FY 2019.The factors that affected these numbers last year, according to the company, included the launch of an iOS app that pushed clients Acquisition, introducing its feature for low-income customers with USSD banking services; and a social chat feature to allow faster transactions. Besides that, Carbon obtained a microfinance bank license in an attempt to become a digital bank. The license implies, according to Dozie, that Carbon’s customers are given additional protection by the Nigerian Deposit Insurance Corporation through depositor insurance. The standard Carbon wallet is now a full-fledged bank account, Dozie says, and clients will transact on the platform like any bank would.

CGAP and FarmDrive Announce Partnership for Satellite-Based Credit Assessments for Smallholder Farmers

Through CGAP’s financial contribution, FarmDrive will collaborate with The Impact Lab and Planet to use satellite images to better understand planting cycles, crop yields, and trends in production to help forecast future revenues, timing of income and potential gaps in payments.

FarmDrive Co-founder commented, “We are delighted by CGAP’s support. We created FarmDrive to revitalize agricultural production and improve the livelihoods of smallholder farmers. The opportunity to incorporate world-class satellite technology and data analytics is a monumental step towards achieving these goals.”

 AgroCenta’s main competitors are Esoko (www.esoko.com), FarmerLine (www.farmerline.co) and Farm Radio (www.farmradio.org). These 3 competitors are “information-based” only, delivering market prices, weather information and extension advisory services via SMS to farmers.

Lending through a pandemic COVID-19 has prevented them settling into Kenya, where there are no less than 50 digital lending platforms competing for an adult population that is over 80% financially included.  Reports of predatory lending have increased red tape in the East African country. A newly gazetted directive bars digital lenders from reporting defaulting borrowers below certain amounts to credit bureaus, among other rules.  It increases the time it will take for a new entrant like Carbon to comfortably express its various services. “We haven’t really had a chance to test the engine,” Dozie says, but they have given out enough loans to calibrate their algorithm. In Nigeria, they have reduced lending to shore up against the uncertainty caused by the pandemic, revising the repayment schedule for 9,016 loans. However, Dozie says they are currently at more than half the level achieved last year, in value and volume. Another profitable year ahead? Carbon’s products need overall improvement, in responding to customer complaints (see responses to this tweet) about deductions, and notification lags, among others. The pandemic’s impact on the Nigerian economy could have an effect on the company’s bottom line. Profit in the next report might as well be less impressive than what this year’s report contains. “It will be easier to beat [this year’s] numbers in naira terms, but we are all at the mercy of macroeconomics on the dollar terms,” Dozie says. He says they will report whatever happens, as part of a long-term pitch to customers who, he believes, will be impressed by an honest expression of financial strength. Otherwise, focus remains on leveraging other strategic moves from 2019, notably the acquisition of payments startup Amplify.  The latter’s intellectual property has gone into developing an SME platform, as well as in developing Carbon Express, a smartphone keypad button that can be used for instant transactions within any app. Carbon acquired Amplify particularly for this feature and their engineering. Maxwell Obi, one of Amplify’s two co-founders who joined Carbon as part of the deal, has left the company, but the others have been instrumental in building valuable aspects like an iOS app.

Another value-adding space is credit reporting. Carbon doesn’t produce the reports; they source from partner bureaus, and make them available to customers. 

In an audited report published this week, Carbon, the Nigerian fintech company, declared that it made the naira equivalent of $312,905 in profit after tax in 2019. 

Users wanting to join a circle on MoneyFellows need to complete basic identity verification if the payout is low. If the payout is higher, the users will need to provide more documents such as income verification and assets owned to the company, which will provide a credit score.

Today, MoneyFellows has racked up more than 500,000 users, of which 200,000 are active. Active users refer to those who have completed their accreditation by providing all of the documents required and have joined money circles. Mr Wadi estimates that a “few hundred million Egyptian pounds” have rotated through the platform.