Rwanda on the rise, with Sam Tayengwa
So if you were to think of some of these African countries and then go into Rwanda, you will understand that the credit growth and maturity is fairly new outside of South Africa, most of these African countries had predominantly been cash-driven markets, it's not to say there wouldn't have been a form of lending or products that would have been there. But if you think of the South African credit market or maturity curve, you know, retail, for instance, people go and buy clothes on credit, you have never seen that in any of the African markets, they get a shock to hear that you buy clothes on credit. So there's still a lot of whitespace, there's still a lot of opportunities for better products to come into play. So personal loans have predominantly been the default lending product that we've seen in the market across all the financial institutions in Rwanda.
But now mortgage, your typical mortgage, right? It's starting to emerge as a product, that historically people would probably just get a personal loan and go buy a plot of land and try to, you know, use their own income to build a house for themselves. What you have started to see off the lead is vehicle financing starting to come up in Rwanda. I'm not sure how close you are to the VW project that kicked off, I think, a couple of years back where they had a factory and wonder and assembling factory and wonder, because outside of South Africa, maybe with the exception of Botswana and Namibia, most of these countries do a lot of great imports. Right? So you find a lot of Japanese cars out here, right? So with that said, vehicle finance, the process of it has been much of a challenge because the bank doesn't know the vehicle, they're financing, they don't have confidence on the quality of the vehicle, right?
A massively more inclusive credit score, with Charles Wandia
So that's why we work with Airtel to say, let's bridge this gap. Let's try to be the boundary between the lenders and the borrowers. And the only way you can do that is having standardised credit score.
So Airtel provides all the transactions when you buy airtime on your phone, when you buy data, pay a bill, you know, that information tells us probably you have some responsibility in your house, you're moving around, probably you have some kind of mobility, are you having so many people different one sending to you, tells you you're making sales.
But if you're just receiving from one person, we can can infer probably your law student getting some update from the parents.
Familiar but digital, with Rohit Bhargava
We're talking in India of about over 50 million customers. So numbers are huge.
And this is only in India we're talking about. But even here, in Canada, also, you have some microfinance, a lot of people are involved in this. And there's some very large institutions in India, which does this.
Gamifying a route to an ongoing credit relationship, with Jorge Enriquez
So we did this that at the beginning, the very first experiments, the very first beta test, is if you want to borrow from Credilikeme, you need to post on your wall and have 10 friends vouch for you.
And then, like that, we came up with this term of crowdsourcing your credit score.
Definitely, that was non-scalable.
It was challenging, operational wise, but we learned a lot of the willingness, we learned a lot about the willingness of people to prove they're credit worthy when there isn't enough information. And we learn that if we create this circle of trust with our user base, they would be willing to share stuff with us.