SPECIAL REPORT: Credit Scoring Methods, Data for Farmers, Digital Financial Services on Offer as 30 Firms Showcase Inclusive Finance Products at SAM Innovators’ Village (Part One)

Dozens of firms presented their newest technologies and other products during the full-day Innovators’ Village of the recent SAM conference. Among these was ICCO Cooperation, whose representatives described their organization’s ACAT tool for evaluating the creditworthiness of agricultural producers. ACAT, which was designed in partnership with the French bank Crédit Agricole, offers features to help loan officers who do not specialize in agriculture to evaluate producers’ operations. The tool calculates the input needs per hectare for crops such as sesame as well as predicting farmers’ income. While the pilot phase has gone well, there have been a few challenges, such as poor internet connectivity and difficulty calculating the sizes of the farmers’ plots due to deficient land surveys.

Mohamed Asri of HPS (Hightech Payment Systems) discussed his firm’s PowerCard core banking system, which allows the “client to act as an agent.” The system allows her to perform transactions, apply for loans, and get a credit score that she can monitor as she works to improve it. Upon loan disbursal, she can access the funds via a bank or payment card, among other other avenues. PowerCard also allows loan officers to operate via tablets. The system conforms to the currencies, languages and regulatory requirements of many countries.

Jean-Louis Perrier of Suricate Solutions explained his firm’s work to reduce the time it takes for financial services providers (FSPs) to discover security breaches. While months often pass without detection, he said, Suricate can often find breaches in just days or hours. The computer systems operated by Suricate’s 47 FSP clients automatically send data logs to the firm’s center in Senegal for risk analysis. As part of its work, Suricate also trains security engineers, counsels central banks on security and shares information on emerging threats with others in the industry to improve the security of all.

Representatives of Rwanda-based ADFinance described their firm’s “Push and Pull” service, which allows clients to add to or withdraw from their savings accounts via agents, banks and automated teller machines (ATMs). These transactions, which can be initiated via a code sent from a simple mobile phone, work via mobile money systems such as MTN and Orange. The service is part of ADFinance’s core banking system, which is deployed via both cloud and in-office installations in eight countries.

Quipu, a member of the ProCredit Group, offers FSPs a subscription-based model to offload data management processes to a remote system. This includes a decision-making and scoring tool that incorporates quantitative and qualitative data to evaluate client creditworthiness. Among the core banking system’s other features is significant flexibility regarding repayment schedules. The firm has been active in microfinance for 30 years, and it now has clients in Africa, Europe and Latin America.

Projet Femmes-Jeunes Entreprenants et Citoyenneté (ProFeJeC) offers a 12-month incubator program for innovative financial initiatives run by women and youth in Burkina Faso. Several of its constituent organizations presented at the Innovators’ Village, including the following: (1) Yelen, an NGO offering technology-based health and microinsurance solutions; (2) Aion Digital, whose Yelkai savings product enables women to save via FSPs and telecommunication firms’ mobile money services; (3) AgriData, which provides weather and agricultural information to small-scale farmers, with local-language call centers and voice messages that can serve clients whether or not they are literate; and (4) ITS, which connects FSPs with clients via agents, the internet and mobile devices in a way that reduces the challenges of tracing cash.

This article is part of a sponsored series on SAM (the French acronym for African Microfinance Week), a major conference dedicated to financial inclusion in Africa. The most recent SAM took place in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, from October 21-25, 2019.

ADA, an NGO based in Luxembourg, co-organizes SAM every two years with the support of Luxembourg’s Ministry for Development Cooperation and Humanitarian Affairs. The SAM steering committee members are: ADA, Luxembourg’s Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs, the Microfinance African Institutions Network, the African Rural and Agricultural Credit Association, and the Fédération des Association Professionnelle des Systèmes Financiers Décentralisés de l’Union Economique et Monétaire Ouest Africaine. We invite you to learn more about SAM at http://www.sam.africa.

MicroCapital has been contracted to promote and document each SAM since 2015.

Additional Resources

SAM
http://sam.africa/

Other MicroCapital coverage of SAM and vignettes demonstrating its value to participants
http://www.microcapital.org/category/semaine-africaine-de-la-microfinance-sam/

Vignettes demonstrating the value of SAM en francais
https://www.ada-microfinance.org/fr/evenements/semaine-africaine-microfinance/objectif-sam-2019/paroles-de-nos-participants