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FarmDrive’s alternative credit risk assessment model is providing financial institutions with an agriculturally relevant and data-driven model to assess risk and develop loans that fit the needs of smallholder farmers. Not only will this solution unlock millions of dollars of previously risk-averse capital for smallholder farmers, it will improve the livelihoods of entire communities, thereby alleviating poverty, hunger, and inequalities.

Nearly 50 million smallholder farmers in Africa are struggling to support their families and communities through agri-business because less than 10% have their economic needs met by the financial sector. Without access to credit, they remain unable to purchase quality inputs, make productive investments, and improve their production and harvests.

FarmDrive’s alternative credit risk assessment model is providing financial institutions with an agriculturally relevant and data-driven model to assess risk and develop loans that fit the needs of smallholder farmers. Not only will this solution unlock millions of dollars of previously risk-averse capital for smallholder farmers, it will improve the livelihoods of entire communities, thereby alleviating poverty, hunger, and inequalities.

Kiva takes due diligence and monitoring very seriously as part of our responsibility to lenders and borrowers. We encourage all lenders to learn about the risks of lending on Kiva as Kiva does not guarantee repayment on any loans. Lending on Kiva may involve loss of principal, for a variety of reasons including if the borrower doesn’t repay, the Field Partner doesn’t repay or from currency loss. The level of due diligence relevant to a specific loan on Kiva depends on a variety of factors, including how the loan is administered. Most loans on Kiva are administered by one of our local partners working in more than 80 countries. Kiva conducts due diligence on all Field Partners prior to allowing them to begin posting loans on the Kiva platform. To learn more about this process visit our Field Partner due diligence page.

The probability that a customer would incur financial losses in financial transactions conducted using Fintech is referred to as financial risk particularly when these losses would have been avoided if the same transactions had been conducted on a conventional platform (Keong et al., 2020; Razzaque et al., 2020). Financial risk can also be incurred by the financial service provider thereby distorting the operating budget of the firm. An example of a financial loss according to Khalil and Alam (2020) is when the process of launching a Fintech service has taken a longer time than planned thereby translating to an increase in the total cost of implementation. The prevalence of financial risk has heightened due to the nature of digital technology employed by Fintech, which could lead to recurrence in financial losses driven by electronic fraud (e-fraud) (Keong et al., 2020). These authors also listed other causes or drivers of financial risk as factors related to budgetary exchange framework, currency misrepresentation, and additional exchange fees that accompany the preferred value. 

By accruing farmer data, FarmDrive eliminates some of the risk for banks. FarmDrive has partnered with African financial firms who accept their alternative credit scores and determine appropriate loans for smallholder farmers. Lending institutions thus consider both the self-reported financial history of farmers as well as exogenous variables that will affect their crop yields.

FarmDrive depends on aid organizations, like USAID, and private firms that operate in the agricultural industry. FarmDrive is expanding its data collection through new partnerships with Planet, a satellite company, and The Impact Lab, a data analytics group, to potentially incorporate climate information gathered via satellite imagery into its algorithm.

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.

Ethiopay is a four-party scheme, in which the issuer and acquirer are different entities, and is open for all payment institutions to join and issue their own cards. There are no limitations as to who may join the scheme, as long as the requirements of the scheme are met.Ethiopay Card schemes enables a simplified and guaranteed exchange of money between merchants, customers and their banks, by operating national & international networks and setting uniform standards.More specifically, Ethiopay defines rules for the routing of payment authorizations and settlement requests in point-of-sale and e-commerce transactions between merchant acquirers and card issuers, as well as ATM withdrawals or purchases with cashback transactions.

Ethswitch is the owner of Ethiopay-Ethiopia’s domestic Card Scheme. Ethiopay is developed for all banks in Ethiopia to issue and acquire payment cards.

Ethiopay is a four-party scheme, in which the issuer and acquirer are different entities, and is open for all payment institutions to join and issue their own cards. There are no limitations as to who may join the scheme, as long as the requirements of the scheme are met.Ethiopay Card schemes enables a simplified and guaranteed exchange of money between merchants, customers and their banks, by operating national & international networks and setting uniform standards.More specifically, Ethiopay defines rules for the routing of payment authorizations and settlement requests in point-of-sale and e-commerce transactions between merchant acquirers and card issuers, as well as ATM withdrawals or purchases with cashback transactions.

he adopted approach is applied and evaluated employing a selection of cases from individual loans. From this perspective, the case base and the codified knowledge about how to evaluate risks associated with a loan represent two examples of knowledge IT artifacts.

FarmDrive is a tech-driven social enterprise working at the intersection of technology, agriculture and finance. FarmDrive is improving the livelihoods of smallholder farmers in Africa by using new technology and alternative data to increase availability of capital; mitigating both financial and operational risks while creating shared value for other players in the value chain.

FarmDrive understands smallholder farmers uniquely through dynamic datasets and translates this to financial institutions. More than 50 million smallholder farmers in Africa are struggling to make a living due to lack of capital to improve their farming activities.

FarmDrive has developed a platform that gathers data on smallholder farmers both from the ‘ground’ and ‘data from the sky’. FarmDrive uses sophisticated algorithms to turn that data into comprehensive credit profiles of “unbanked and underbanked” smallholders who have little access to credit.

Farmers in emerging markets face challenges with low productivity. Due to the risks they face from ongoing climate change, pests and diseases, farmers struggle to find financial stability. Pula is at the center of an ecosystem that helps them manage their risks with insurance and digital solutions.

Simplicity is a key feature of this type of investing. All investors need to do is create a username and password and typically answer between 10 to 15 basic financial questions to open an account. The service then plugs your answers into an algorithm that determines the portfolio and asset allocation that is appropriate for your age, risk tolerance and how long you wish to invest. Rob advisors typically follow passive investments such as tracker funds and exchange traded funds (ETF) based on modern portfolio theory research.

Another startup is Apollo Agriculture which raised $6 million Series A, akin to Pula. Not only did the pair raise the same round, Apollo Agriculture and Pula both deal with providing financial resources to smallholder farmers.

Pula is solving this problem by using technology and data. Through its Area Yield Index Insurance product, the insurtech startup leverages machine learning, crop-cut experiments and data points relating to weather patterns and farmer losses, to build products that cater to various risks.But getting farmers on board has never been easy, Goslinga told TechCrunch. According to her, Pula has understood not to sell insurance directly to small-scale farmers, because they can suffer from optimism bias. “Some think a climate disaster wouldn’t hit their farms for a particular season; hence, they don’t ask for insurance initially. But if they witness any of these climate risks during the season, they would want to get insurance, which is counterproductive to Pula,” said the founder in a phone call.

Pula, a Kenyan insurtech startup that specialises in digital and agricultural insurance to derisk millions of smallholder farmers across Africa, has closed a Series A investment of $6 million.The round was led by Pan-African early-stage venture capital firm, TLcom Capital, with participation from nonprofit Women’s World Banking. The raise comes after Pula closed $1 million in seed investment from Rocher Participations with support from Accion Venture Lab, Omidyar Network and several angel investors in 2018.

“It’s about using insurance to get rid of risk for these farmers and unlock opportunities for them,” Chris says. He says that research found that for farmers who received insurance (rather than cash grants) borrowed and invested more in their farms.

CropAssure has been developed by our team of agronomists to protect against weather events most detrimental to almond growth, specific to your region. We will pair you with a member of our agronomic team to develop an insurance product that fits your needs and your budget.

easily understandable policies that will protect you against the risks completely out of your control - unpredictable weather.

protect against weather events most detrimental to almond growth, specific to your region

Financial-technology companies are changing the face of finance. Over the past ten years, what started mostly as disruption in the payments space has expanded to every corner of finance. Even areas once assumed to be safe are seeing new entrants and competitive threats. Wealth and asset management, wholesale banking, capital markets, regulation and risk (“regtech”), and trade finance are just the most recent areas to see innovation driven by small technology-first players.

Whether fintechs ultimately win or lose significant market share may be beside the point; they are redefining customer expectations and continue to create new business models. As fintechs are frequently building their entire technology stacks from the ground up, they are highlighting incumbent financial institutions’ weaknesses not only in digital user experiences but also in operational efficiency. Whether a new digital brokerage wins or loses may not matter when customer expectations around brokerage fees change. A retail foreign-exchange fintech having 5 or 50 percent of the market may matter less than retail FX margins disappearing for everyone. Whether the next crops of “neobanks” disrupt retail banking may be less important than their highlighting for users and customers the possibilities of a modern, digital-first experience.

f your downside potential from disruptive threats. Incumbents can choose to invest in companies they partner with or to focus on areas they know well or interesting adjacencies. We frequently advise clients to find ways of keeping corporate venture-capital groups slightly at arm’s length to attract skilled managers, and we recently have seen increased interest in investing in established outside managers who focus on financial technology. Transform yourself to be more like a fintech. Digital transformation is a difficult but necessary process for most incumbent financial institutions. Redesigning core infrastructure to be more modular and dynamic, driving a new agile operating model, and upgrading technology and workforce skills are all necessary to compete with outside threats, fintech and otherwise. Build your own (internal) fintech. The road for transformations is normally measured in years, but the competitive threat from fintechs is today. Increasingly, we are seeing financial institutions try to beat fintechs at their own game or self-disrupt areas of their business before others can. The key to success in new digital business building is to combine the agility, speed, and talent of a start-up with the “unfair advantage” of an incumbent by leveraging existing assets (e.g. customers, distribution, or infrastructure). Serve the fintechs. A few financial institutions can find their competitive advantage in creating scaled, efficient technology and operations to enable others to embed financial services in their customer experiences. This “banking as a service” business model depends on finding a profitable path to white labeling but draws on the inspiration of large tech platforms. Enabling the customer experiences of others has quickly moved beyond just enabling fintechs to also working with big technology companies, retailers, telecommunications companies, and beyond. Ignore fintechs. Although ignoring the competition is rarely the right choice, some businesses are built on moats—frequently regulatory—that are difficult to disrupt or they play within narrow markets. Companies should prioritize where they need to focus and in doing so know when they need to pay attention and when they need to avoid the distraction of disrupters.

Pula, a five-year old insurtech startup, provides small scale farmers with agricultural insurance to help manage the risk of enduring extreme conditions. Insurtech is one of the fast-growing sub-sectors of the fintech, which has booming with investors in African startups.

Pula will also be expanding to Asia, targeting smallholder farmers as it has in Africa, with a focus on Philippines, Thailand, Turkey, and Pakistan. “What we’ve realized is that African solutions are in no way inferior to Asian, European solutions

Since it was founded in 2015, Pula has impacted 4.3 million farmers across 13 African markets. Goslinga says key to Pula’s business model is helps insurance companies better understand the risks of small scale farming.With an average premium subscription of $4 for small-scale farmers in Africa, Pula actually markets the insurance product to banking partners rather than directly to farmers. The banks make the insurance mandatory before they approve loans to the farmers.

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).

A free app available for any smartphone, SnapScan works almost like a pocket ATM linked to the user’s debit or credit card account. Instead of handing over a card, customers scan a unique SnapScan logo posted at the cash register with their camera-enabled phone. They enter the amount, type in a pin code (or use touch ID) and a few seconds later the vendor’s phone chimes with a confirmation sent by SMS. It’s quick, painless, and entirely safe, says Ehlers. SnapScan is backed by Standard Bank, one of South Africa’s biggest banks, and uses cutting-edge fraud protection technology. More to the point, he notes, it means that vendors never have access to actual credit card details. “That means no one is noting down your number so he can go shopping later,” says Ehlers.

It’s been so long since 30-year-old Cape Town entrepreneur Kobus Ehlers last used his wallet that he’s not even sure where it is. “My car maybe?” he says as he reflexively scans the cheerfully decorated offices of his startup, SnapScan. When it’s pointed out that leaving a wallet in a car in a city infamous for break-ins and carjackings may not be a good idea, he shrugs. He probably doesn’t even have the equivalent of five dollars in it, he says. “I never use cash. Credit cards are over. There are much better ways to pay for things.”As the co-founder of one of South Africa’s most successful electronic payments apps, Ehlers is of course expected to use his own product. But the real reason he isn’t worried about his wallet is because Cape Town is a city seduced by the idea of cashless and cardless transactions, in no small part because of his company’s success. “You can literally wake up in the morning, buy a cup of coffee, go to your dentist, have lunch, pay your bills, take a taxi, go out for dinner, and donate to your favorite cause without using cash or a card,” says Ehlers. “And in none of that is there any risk of your card details getting stolen, or you getting mugged for your cash.”

It’s been so long since 30-year-old Cape Town entrepreneur Kobus Ehlers last used his wallet that he’s not even sure where it is. “My car maybe?” he says as he reflexively scans the cheerfully decorated offices of his startup, SnapScan. When it’s pointed out that leaving a wallet in a car in a city infamous for break-ins and carjackings may not be a good idea, he shrugs. He probably doesn’t even have the equivalent of five dollars in it, he says. “I never use cash. Credit cards are over. There are much better ways to pay for things.”As the co-founder of one of South Africa’s most successful electronic payments apps, Ehlers is of course expected to use his own product. But the real reason he isn’t worried about his wallet is because Cape Town is a city seduced by the idea of cashless and cardless transactions, in no small part because of his company’s success. “You can literally wake up in the morning, buy a cup of coffee, go to your dentist, have lunch, pay your bills, take a taxi, go out for dinner, and donate to your favorite cause without using cash or a card,” says Ehlers. “And in none of that is there any risk of your card details getting stolen, or you getting mugged for your cash.”

FarmDrive generates real-time credit reports for small farmers, allowing them to access loans from financial institutions and agricultural input providers via mobile phone. 

FarmDrive collects expense and revenue data from farmers via SMS and combines it with satellite imaging, remote sensing technology and alternative data points (e.g., soil analysis, weather forecasts) to create detailed yield estimates and assess credit risk.