By 2020, about 1 million people in Asia will receive their very first loans ever. Crypto economy is the tool that will help them to merge into financial markets and to apply for approximately 3 million payday loans annually. MicroMoney, a global blockchain company and lending services provider, aims to support this process allowing people with no credit rating score to enter Asian banks with positive credit histories.
MicroMoney’s co-founder, Anton Dziatkovsky, is going to form a market for the credit histories creation from scratch and their further support in emerging markets. Now his company works as a microfinance business helping the unbanked and underbanked people to provide their primary needs with payday loans. On the other hand, MicroMoney helps banks and other financial organizations to access new markets in the Southeast Asia and other emerging regions with lower risks providing them with a database of reliable borrowers in each region with all the segmentation by an audience, risk level and costs related to each segment. MicroMoney’s platform uses Big Data methods, all the data is keeping with the help of blockchain technology, and the unique scoring model based on information received from client’s mobile phone with the special application designed by the company.
The process looks quite simple for a lender: The Big Data platform drives all the data received from the phone through neural networks, analyzes the result, and evaluate a customer’s trustworthiness. Clear and full information about a person based on the analysis of a customer’s data available from all the mobile sources and includes career information, interests, social networks accounts (confirming that this particular person is real), travel notes, family status, penalties received and so on. According to Anton Dziatkovsky, this content sounds more truthful and allows predicting a customer’s behavior to avoid excessive risks.
The company chose the mobile phone because of a high level of smartphones’ penetration, even in countries with a low level of banking services distribution. For example, in Africa, 80% of the population does not have a bank account but 63 of 100 people use mobile phones. Secondly, this is a higher popularity of smartphones above laptops and computers. Finally, it’s practically equal capabilities of smartphones’ and PCs processors and features along with significant progress in financial services mobilization, cloud services, and Big Data systems to analyze all these data.
“95% of our clients take their first loan ever,” — Anton Dziatkovsky says. — “Usually, they get stuck in a kind of endless circle: if they need a credit, they need a credit history, and to get a credit score and the history they need a credit. Meanwhile, banks are keeping a focus on medium and large enterprises lending in emerging markets. Microfinance companies embrace the others but the process of loan applications approval in Asia is extremely complicated and long due to the lack of automation. The common practice there is to keep all the data in Excel or even in paper ledgers. For the loan application, a person needs a collateral (in Cambodia and Myanmar, for example, it can be real or land property) and a lot of papers such as references from police, municipality, property owner, income statement, a letter from job manager etc. A person may find four or six friends and band them to achieve a group loan. In Indonesia, Cambodia, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka, for example, the process may last from 1 week to 2-3 months. MicroMoney approve or decline a loan application within 15 minutes without any collaterals or documents required. The first loan will be small — about $23 usually but after 5-10 loans, a borrower can rise up to $200-300”.
In turn, banks, credit, and insurance companies have to spend up to 15% of the budget for the customers’ verification and purchase credit histories from credit bureaus in order to explore their risks and loan percentage to establish for each audience segment. According to statistics, banks make 2-3 requests per one person per year with the price of inquiry $1-10 average. MicroMoney plans to give all these financial organizations an access to its list of the most reliable borrowers from each region with positive credit score rates.
The market seems to be very perspective: 39% of the world’s population doesn’t have a bank account. According to the McKinsey, the most affected regions are Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East (about 65-80% of the adult population are unbanked).
MicroMoney now employs about 200 people in Cambodia, Myanmar, Singapore, Sri-Lanka, and Thailand to service its microfinance business and some software developers, marketing, and PR managers, copywriters from the United Kingdom, Israel, and Russia to promote the company. In Asia, the project works with local partners. The first partner is the adviser to the Prime Minister of Cambodia for Economic Affairs, and CEO of one of the largest development companies in the country Sonatra Group, Okna Sorn Sokna. The second is the East Wing ASA Capital venture fund with about $100 million of capital and its member, the head of Sonatra’s affiliate companies — Mr. Tetsuji Nagata. They both are not only the stakeholders and top-managers of MicroMoney but also enthusiastic advisors for the company’s token distribution campaign that will start this October.
Anton Dziatkovsky is sure to win the game and promises that the company’s tokens will grow constantly supported by the growth in the company’s microfinance business and payday loans approved, along with Big Data platform high demand from banks waiting for an entrance to emerging markets. “We will do our best to raise the price of our tokens up to +1000% for the first year due to our launch in five new markets by the end of 2017”.
MicroMoney plans to issue about 600 thousand payday loans per year and, thus, involve 1 million of unbanked people into crypto-economy by 2020. “Now about two and a half billion people worldwide are unserved and don’t have any access to bank services. Our goal is to connect banks and unbanked”, — notes Anton.
