(French-English) A New Model of Microfinance For Africa, and Beyond - Viola Llewellyn - TED Institute (DownSub - Com)
(French-English) A New Model of Microfinance For Africa, and Beyond - Viola Llewellyn - TED Institute (DownSub - Com)
[Music] in many parts of the world when you apply for a business loan at a bank
the bank is going to take down various pieces of information about you such as
your age your name education and address and input that information into a risk
model to figure out if you're going to pay that money back and together
additional information about you now that we live in the glorious age of
artificial intelligence and machine learning even more information can be
collected about you and analyzed to figure out what makes you successful in
business that is unless the data being collected about you has nothing to do with
what really makes you successful this would seem obvious right if you're going to
use technology to determine the creditworthiness of a business or an individual
you should make sure that the data you're using is at least relevant by geography
culture and demographic and that's how it works in most of the Western world and
the result of that is the generation of wealth and prosperity but in Africa we
have a problem in sub-saharan Africa where we operate finding the right kind of
data and sourcing that data to make these decisions is incredibly difficult
customers are thin file the information is localized at a bank it's not shared
it's not federated in a general sense like you would with a [ __ ] with a credit
bureau and those decisions are hard in Africa we should be completing on a global
basis but we're not and that's because the financial institutions in our
ecosystems don't have the technology or the risk models to harness the wealth
potential accurately and what I mean by that is that the traditional methods
currently use to evaluate the creditworthiness and the risk profiles of these
businesses completely ignore the vast differences and the cultural realities of
ethnic and religious groups across the continent and I really do think that in
order for them to compete on a global scale Africans must start to generate and
transfer wealth authentically and the only way to do that is to build our culture
in our history directly into the financial ecosystem our business our banking and
our technology so a few years back when we started this journey we noticed that
the banks and the microfinance institutions who had set up shop across Africa
didn't seem to be able to make a dent in the more than three hundred billion u.s.
dollar business credit gap which to us means that the companies are supposed to
be helping actually are not growing or generating wealth at all and I've got
feeling was that this is because they actually do not understand African
businesses or entrepreneurs so in 2013 I co-founded a company called oh bombuh
with my business partner Marvin Cole with the goal that we would try to figure
out how to get these businesses to grow correctly and we started by studying
various tribes in Cameroon to figure out what is it that makes them successful
and how do they respond to financial obligations now Africa has thousands of
ethnic groups and more than 2,000 different languages and the cultural diversity
and traditions make for a very complex landscape so if you want to start talking
about business and financial products you might you really need a deep
understanding of the nuances and the history and respect the the elegance
required to code for the financial products and the business environment of the
vast African market and this is why we decided to use artificial intelligence and
our own proprietary technology to embed ethnic and cultural data into the risk
models algorithms and products that we have since developed so here's an example
if you take an entrepreneur who goes into a microfinance institution to apply for
a loan these types of businesses are often from the informal sector they often
use their family members as employees they don't keep a balance sheet and they're
certainly not working to a well-written business plan and they are sometimes
functionally illiterate and by that we mean they are able to read and write but
they may not be formally educated in business and these applicants usually get
turned down by banks and this is the reason why they go to microfinance
institutions but the microfinance institutions when determining risk about these
groups can only really use what is at hand information like you look like a woman
your gender your age your bank account how you deposit your capital and
collateral hopefully that collateral has the kind of land title that they can use
for these loans but with the model that we use we added an additional maybe as
much as 400 additional data points things like language dialect family structure
personal and professional relationships number of wives and even tribe and that's
because we believe that this is the kind of information plus some other pieces
that you truly need to understand African business risk so what about the house
the man who applies for a loan now in his neighborhood he has a shop and Eid he
sells candles and in August and September he's selling back-to-school items the
rest of the year maybe small electronics and his shop is usually always open
except for about four to six weeks when he's closed for Ramadan now he can't go
to a microfinance institution because most microfinance institutions actually do
not carry Islamic products that type that are non-interest bearing and banks are
going to think he's a high risk because of the changing nature of his business so
he would likely turning him down and that would be that but we know that that
would be indeed and be a mistake because we know and understand that
traditionally speaking if he is Hauser there is a chance he's got more than one
wife and if he does have more than one wife it means that he's actually a very
good risk for us and he's the kind of customer that we like to to fund and that's
because polygamy which is still practiced in Africa actually acts as a form of
life insurance its strategic it's a sign of wealth and stability it is not a sign
of romantic instability and what about ethnic groups like the befores bar ombo
Ballon dough or the Rocco's groups that have a rich agricultural way of life now
groups like this they are driven by their social standing and operate within a
cash economy with close ties to informal loan and saving groups that we call in
Jan gays and banks are unable to justify lending to groups like this because they
often don't have enough banking information all the type of bank accounts that
they can monitor or even the property with the right collateral to be used now if
you really want to understand the risk you should start evaluating their
relationships with council leaders and tribal leaders not necessarily their banks
or their balance sheets these groups are compelled by the family and tribal
obligations and they're super careful with their money and they're very careful
with business they dare not lose their social standing because it would be the
equivalent of losing a credit score now if a bank or a microfinance institution
were to try to lend money to these groups it actually would not be that effective
at helping them to generate more revenue or build wealth there long agricultural
tradition is something that we would instead leverage and we find that they will
do better getting support with warehousing logistics and that sort of thing alone
is probably just not the best type of product for them so these are just a few
examples and hopefully you'll see what we saw just how huge this opportunity can
be Thanks in Africa don't build mobile apps or the technologies that will allow
them to do things like measured the success of a woman's vegetable farm or to
incorporate how well a parent pays their children's school fees into a risk model
so we thought that we should use technology that would build a roast model to do
exactly that and build technology and products to match and so far it's working
we've deployed more than 25 million to 260 companies or more and helped them to
achieve seven times the amount of revenue and in some cases as much as four times
the amount of inventory available to sell and in sub-saharan Africa we have
barely begun to scratch the surface of how to build the right technologies to
help African businesses make it into the future and understanding how to do that
begins with understanding the human beings right now 1.2 billion human beings on
the African continent will soon be 2.3 billion over the next 30 years and by 2100
one third of the Earth's population will live on my continent that's a lot of
potential entrepreneurs who could be generating wealth for themselves their
families communities and the world if the path to wealth generation was defined
for them now let's zoom out imagine around the world if financial products were
designed with the cultural nuance and sensitivity towards the businesses that
they seek to support would this mean more wealth in America's heartland with the
lifetime service and experience of a retiree be an advantage when applying for a
start-up loan what about women entrepreneurs whose cultures make it more likely
that they will be stay-at-home moms could this lead to loans tailor-made for the
woman building an internet business out of her living room or financial services
for Native Americans who understand how to build wealth from the land and the
natural resources the reasons why we do this is for the same reasons that pandora
chose to map the music genome or the reasons why geneticists rushed to map the
human genome it's to find truth and to find understanding so that we can develop
tools to harness our own potential and realize our
best selves in digitizing our future we will preserve the beauty of our culture
and unlock the code to our best wealth traits and if we do this Africans will
become global citizens with less reliance on charity becoming a global citizen
also means that we have a place at the table as equals lastly the real reason we
must do this is because we want to build a foundation for our future that is
rooted in who we authenticate [Applause]
intelligence artificielle et de
la solvabilité et les
algorithmes et
année,
institutions de microfinance ne
des groupes informels de prêt et d'épargne que nous appelons en janvier, les
frais de scolarité de ses enfants dans un modèle de risque. Nous avons donc
fonctionne,
disponibles à la vente. En
ressources naturelles les raisons pour lesquelles nous faisons cela sont
authentifions.
[Applaudissements]