CreditEase - an SME Finance Forum member - founder and CEO Ning Tang recently shared with Mckinsey his perspective on how fintech players, from both within and outside China, can capture the opportunity among small and midsize Chinese businesses and how artificial intelligence (AI) can help. The following commentary is adapted from that conversation.
This Forbes' article written by John Welsh, includes: a profile on CreditEnable; highlights about the CEO and Founder Nadia Sood’s career and outlines CreditEnable's 'Changemakers Programme', an initiative they have just launched in conjunction with the Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT), the world’s largest SME association, representing 70 million SMEs to help their members access affordable debt.
Businesses such as Amazon and Uber have created successful customer experience models. In this blog, the author shares his common denominators that the financial industry should pay close attention to
1. Be customer experience obsessed.
A study found that 68% of millennials have stopped doing business with a brand due to a single poor customer experience.
In a bid to accelerate women’s financial inclusion in MENA, the region with the lowest female economic participation in the world, the DFID-funded Arab Women’s Enterprise Fund (AWEF) led a study to understand the scope for Digital Financial Services (DFS) in Egypt, map key constraints to women’s financial inclusion and identify opportunities to transform the livelihoods of low-income Egyptian women through improved access to finance.
Access to finance also remains a problem, where 53 percent of women-led small and medium enterprises (SMEs) do not have access to credit and 70 percent of surveyed MENA female entrepreneurs agree that lending conditions in their economy are too restrictive and do not allow them to secure the financing needed for growth.
According to an IFC report, there are a few key challenges that have long limited the digital transformation of financial services in emerging markets. These challenges include: low access to formal financial services; low income and financial-literacy levels; underdeveloped technology solutions; and weak infrastructures.
To date, there has been no efficient way of uncovering synthetic ID fraud. To crack down on it, every customer seeking credit would have to undergo even more rigorous ID checks than they do already. This Mckinsey article proposes a new approach that, with the help of machine learning, digs deep into vast amounts of third-party data to gauge whether the basic information given by an applicant matches that of a real person, thereby weeding out the small proportion of those likely to be using a synthetic ID.
Ammar Khalid, Helena Molina, Susannah Horton, and Patteera Mae Chaladmanakul are second-year International Development students who recently traveled to the Philippines, to gain a deeper knowledge of possible financing models for youth entrepreneurs. Throughout the year, the team conducted a global stocktaking on successful models for financing young entrepreneurs. The forthcoming report will be published jointly by the IFC's SME Finance Forum and the G20 Global Partnership for Financial Inclusion.
By leveraging partnerships with farmers’ cooperatives and telecom operator MTN, in a recent pilot Advans Cote d’Ivoire achieved 100 percent on-time repayment and notably increased school attendance among borrowers’ children. This innovative work with cocoa farmers earned Advans Cote d’Ivoire the 2018 European Microfinance Award for inclusive finance through technology. Advans is trying to solve a liquidity problem with a promising new digital credit product.
Mobile phones are helping millions of low-income customers to access financial services for the first time, but they are also exposing them to new cyber threats they could never have imagined. The Serianu 2017 Africa Cyber Security Report estimates that cybercrime in mobile-based transactions costs businesses $140 million per year in Africa. Why is this becoming more common? And what can providers and policy makers do to prevent it? The author offers some simple measures that providers and policy makers can adopt to protect other mobile financial services users from cyberattacks.
