HiPipo Money

By Our writer

While majority of Uganda’s youth have resorted to running small businesses due to the high unemployment rate, their businesses suffer high failure rates due to, among others, inability to access credit.

This is mainly because most lenders ask for collateral, which most of them do not have.

However, Discount Cards Limited’s CardPesa solution, an online platform that enables ordinary people to access revolving credit on their mobile devices or digital wallets, could salvage them.

According to the Discount Cards Limited Managing Director, Nelson Kituuka, the solution enables people access collateral-free working capital loans instantaneously to invest in their businesses so as to maintain or increase their earnings.

 “We will not provide you money to buy a house, land or Boda Boda, but we shall give you money to fuel your Boda Boda so that you can work. We will give you money to buy ingredients to bake cakes or provide you money to ensure that your daily activities are not hindered by lack of that small ingredient you need to carry out your business,” Kituuka explains.

5Cs.

Instead of asking for physical collateral, CardPesa assesses the borrower’s credit worthiness and loan limits using five Cs – the borrower’s character, capacity, capital, available conditions in the environment and collateral – which in this case is in form of one’s bio data, references and one’s business or work place.

The borrower is, however, required to subscribe to the platform and access funds for a period of the year they have subscribed via www.cardpesa.com/signup.

Kituuka says that if one is subscribed for a year and their monthly limit is UShs500,000, they can access up to UShs6 million by the end of the year, as long as they pay back the borrowed money for that particular month within 30 days.

Basing on one’s credit history on the platform; their limits can be increased and even given better service, according to Kituuka.

To provide the loan service, CardPesa integrated into Airtel Money, MoMo Pay and banks to easily provide instant credit to its clients.

For safety, the CardPesa platform uses a two factor-authentication. A user is thus required to have a secret PIN and to remove the money off the platform; they also need an operator PIN. For instance, if one uses Airtel or MTN mobile money, they will need that secret code or that to their bank account before the money can be released.

While a third of CardPesa’s clients are women, Kituuka says that women are less likely to take loans mainly because they are more risk averse.

To raise their appetite for loans, Kituuka notes that they are looking to partner with organizations that want to empower women and show them that they can borrow and use the credit to increase their revenues.

40-Days 40-FinTechs

Discount Cards is among the firms participating in the ongoing second edition of the 40-Days 40-FinTechs initiative, organized by HiPipo in partnership with Crosslake Technologies, ModusBox and Mojaloop Foundation, and sponsored by the Gates Foundation.

Kituuka applauded HiPipo, saying that 40 Days 40 FinTechs is a move in the right direction as it highlights the different FinTechs and their solutions so that the different sector players see what others are doing and seek to form synergies.

“I thank HiPipo for initiatives like 40 Days 40 FinTechs. To win as FinTechs, the public needs to know what is out there. I was one of the biggest skeptics of what HiPipo was doing but I have watched videos of the players featured and it’s incredible. As a lender, it is important for me to know that there are farmers in this place, with this amount of produce and need this amount of money,” he says, adding that the biggest problem for doing business in third-world countries is the inability to access information on which to base decision making.

The HiPipo Chief Executive Officer Innocent Kawooya says that this year’s edition of the 40-Days 40-FinTechs initiative has showed that there are several FinTech solutions on the Ugandan market, with things like distributed ledger technologies, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Automated Customer Relationship Management, cash management and lending platforms, among others being showcased.

He notes that equity of access to credit is key to achieving business success and financial inclusion.

By Our Writer

By enrolling on the MoMoPay platform, your goal could have been to simply receive digital payments and make your business more efficient.

However, MoMoPay is not your ordinary kind of platform that allows you to only receive digital payments.

It, according to the MTN Mobile Money Uganda Limited Managing Director Stephen Mutana, creates new lines of business for small business owners to earn extra income.

Mutana says that a merchant that uses the MoMoPay platform can also sell airtime and earn 4% commission; can facilitate school fees, and pay utility bills among others.

 “MoMoPay is a full end-to-end proposition that not only allows you to receive digital payments and makes your business more efficient but it also brings new lines of business into your business,” Mutana says.

He adds: “Wherever you see a MoMoPay merchant, however informal they are, it is a business in a box; it not only allows them to receive digital payments but also allows them to receive other lines of business.”

MoMoPay is a product of MTN Mobile Money Uganda Limited, which was recently split from MTN Uganda Limited, following the enactment of the National Payments Systems (NPS) Act last year. The NPS Act required telecommunications companies to separate their mobile money services from voice and data services and run them independently. That said, MTN Mobile Money Uganda Limited is 100 percent owned by MTN Uganda Limited.

Mutana notes that the company applies a tiered Know-Your-Customer system which makes it easy for businesses to use the MoMoPay platform. Someone doing MoMoPay for their small business for instance only needs to have a fully registered SIM card while a big organization needs to provide a few more documents.

Even then, Mutana notes, they have made the process as seamless as possible, by availing digital on-boarding kits that pickup all the required information easily.

He says that the company puts a customer in mind throughout the product development process.

“For people to get the full benefits of the cashless economy, they should be able to transact digitally anywhere; let it be at a local hardware, a shop or salon. But for them to pay cashless, the service has to be relevant to their life,” Mutana says.

He adds: “So we are the ones who should align ourselves to the needs of the customer and as our agenda, we are deeply embedded in the activities of making it easy, within the confines of the regulations, for people to onboard onto these digital services like MoMo Pay.”

The firm also runs the MoKash product, offering unsecured micro-loans and savings products, in partnership with NCBA bank.

It uses one’s information about usage patterns of MTN services to assess one’s creditworthiness.

Additionally, Mutana says the company is in the process of launching more products that specifically target businesses. Among them is the MoMo Business, which builds on MoMoPay but gives businesses more capabilities around invoicing, payments and collection.

Use open APIs

To achieve full financial inclusion, Mutana says there is need for financial literacy, translating material in local languages and enhancing safety to engender and build people’s trust in using digital payment platforms.

Additionally, there is need to make it easy and faster for entrepreneurs with innovative ideas to onboard on open APIs.

“We have open-APIs where we have standardized some of the key functions of mobile money like payments, collections, remittances, and bulk payments. The worst thing is to have a great idea and you get stuck at how you should digitize it. We have done a lot in that area, though there is still a more to be done to get the developer community conversant with the standard APIs,” Mutana says.

The company is among the firms participating in the second edition of the 40-Days 40-FinTechs initiative, organized by HiPipo in partnership with Crosslake Technologies, ModusBox and Mojaloop Foundation, and sponsored by the Gates Foundation.

The HiPipo Chief Executive Officer Innocent Kawooya says this edition is Uganda’s most comprehensive foray into things like distributed ledger technologies, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Automated Customer Relationship Management, cash management and lending platforms, among others. He applauds MTN Uganda for spearheading the digital economy revolution from game changing products such as Mobile Money, MoMoPay and MoKash.

By Our writer

Businesses are increasingly adopting emerging technologies across all functions, owing to the ability to improve operational efficiency, deliver better customer experiences and improve profitability.

Among the providers of these emerging technologies are Financial Technology Companies (FinTechs) like NewLife Technologies Sarl, a Cameroon-based mobile application and website development company, whose SoftPay is empowering businesses with a variety of financial solutions across the different functions to improve efficiency.

Using a mobile application for smartphone users and a Point of Sale (POS) option, the SoftPay Business platform offers solutions including inventory, sales, human resources, ticketing and booking and events management.

The solutions help firms collect payments, manage inventory, payrolls, sales, ticketing and event, among others.

According to the NewLife Technologies co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Ngala Cyprian Mufor, the SoftPay Business platform seeks to help firms manage their interactions with both current and prospecting customers better.

“The system acts as a record of interactions across all business customer-facing touch points; organising, automating and synchronising them to enable you as a business service all your existing customers and respond quickly to issues and new business,” Mufor says.

He adds: “Businesses can manage their inventory, create invoices and distribute them to their clients and collect payments. They can also sell tickets while event organizers can create an event, sell it out, manage check-in and collect payments.”

How the systems work

The SoftPay Business’ Inventory and Service Management solution, for instance, enables businesses take advantage of a multitude of tools to improve efficiency by ensuring that their inventory and sales are in tandem while the Sales Management system enables businesses to manage every sale they make and receive payments through standard payment methods such as mobile money, Visa and Master card.

Its Human Resource Management system, on the other hand, enables a business to link its business account to other SoftPay users and pay them easily while the Ticketing and Bookings Management solution helps businesses sell tickets on multiple channels while reducing check-in-time at entry to the business site.

The PayForms Management solution allows a business to sell products, services and tickets online without having to build an e-commerce website. They simply share with potential clients a link generated on the platform for the product or service offered, using an SMS or social media.

“We are focused on serving and changing lives through technology. We are struggling to create a system that will support the financial inclusion for Africa.  That is why when you look at our platform, our on-boarding time is very short. Within a few seconds after downloading the Mobile App, the user is ready to use it because the on-boarding procedure has been reduced,” he says, adding that the procedure takes less than 15 minutes for those using SoftPay Business.

Using the MTN Mobile Money and Orange Money APIs, users can easily load their SoftPay accounts from any of these service providers as well as withdraw funds from their SoftPay accounts using their mobile network service provider.

Mufor, however, notes that Africa is still grappling with a number of challenges, including the dominance of cash as a means of business transaction, limited talent in the industry and lack of collaboration and support.

NewLife Technologies Sarl is among the FinTechs participating in the 40-days-40-FinTechs initiatives organised by HiPipo, in partnership with Crosslake Tech, ModusBox, and Mojaloop Foundation.

The initiative seeks to enable FinTechs to innovate solutions that facilitate cross-network financial transactions at minimal risks to enhance access to financial services.

The HiPipo Chief Executive Officer Innocent Kawooya, however, says that FinTech in Africa offers attractive opportunities and that investors are rightfully picking interest in the various startups that are offering a plethora of services, ranging from payments and lending, remittances, cross-border transfers and neobanks, among others.

He adds that FinTech is the launchpad on which the promise of full global financial inclusion will be fulfilled.