Quipu Market

Informal economies reside in structural poverty traps and are constrained by significant barriers to commerce like lack of information, cash flow, and access to capital. We are digitally developing a financial infrastructure tailored to the informal sector by creating an app-based digital market and community trading system that strengthens informal economies. We are leveraging the transaction data to assess creditworthiness and unlock access to credit for the billions of underserved micro-businesses globally.

1/3 of the population lives in informal settlements. These settlements, or slums, are home to place-based informal economies making up 60% of the global economy. They’re street vendors and artisan shoe makers, plumbers, and chefs. With an increasing population, they represent the bulk of economic growth and employment opportunities going into the future. 

But these economies are cash-based, unbanked, and offline. Their products and services aren’t listed on marketplaces like MercadoLibre, or eBay; their businesses can’t be found on Google Maps or Yelp. They are facing three main barriers to commerce, they lack:

Visibility: Informal businesses do not have an online presence. And oftentimes, they operate out of their homes, limiting potential customers and income opportunities. 

Cash Flow: During economic crises, money fails to function as liquid utility. This means that people struggle to afford their basic necessities and local businesses are unable to sell their products or services. 

Access to Capital: Micro-merchants are unbanked and lack a digital financial history. Transactions between buyers and sellers go unrecorded meaning there is no evidence to assess credit. Financial institutions exclude them in their lending activities. Those who are lucky might be able to secure loans with abhorrently high interest rates.

We believe communities are capable of redesigning their economies in ways that work for them. We support that process by building digital community marketplaces for informal economies to exchange goods and services. Using the app, informal micro-entrepreneurs create profiles to buy, list and sell goods and services on the digital market using blockchain-based local tokens, which we call quipus. 

Quipus are exchange tokens not meant for accumulation but instead as a complement to cash. They’re valid at all businesses within the marketplace although businesses have full discretion as to how much or what value of their inventory they are willing to receive in quipus. The idea is to have just the right amount of quipus circulating within a local economy to cover the costs of commerce within that economy so that users can save their cash for large expenses outside. We are creating a trading system with a digital means of exchange where none else exists.

By bringing informal economies online with the touch of a smartphone, Quipu is revolutionizing how data can be used as a community asset. We leverage transaction data to inform business decisions and alternatively build and prove creditworthiness so users can access equitable financial services.

The Quipu digital marketplaces are tools for strengthening local, informal economies. Our users are mainly micro-entrepreneurs running small-scale businesses from their homes without formal registration, yet they are central to the neighborhood economy and create wealth. These users are also prosumers, they produce and consume within the neighborhood

Our marketplace is the result of a co-design process. Since our inception, we have led a participatory process with community members of Villa de San Pablo, Barranquilla (Colombia) where we are running our pilot. After collaboratively mapping production and consumption, community members have played a critical role in defining features in the marketplace and co-developing strategies for implementation. This process has informed the development of our first prototype, our MVP and our most recent beta version which is currently live. 

Our hope is that the Quipu Marketplaces serve as a launchpad from financial uncertainty to financial prosperity, allowing microbusinesses to thrive while creating and retaining wealth in their communities. By tackling the visibility, liquidity and access to capital challenges, our technology is also supporting fair economic recovery in the midst of the global crisis of COVID 19. 

Small businesses in the informal economy continue to be hidden in plain sight and marginalized yet they are a massive global economic force. By using Quipu, these populations can now create and retain wealth for themselves, accessing just and equitable financial services that can support their growth. We are leveraging the high levels of social capital in informal settlements, their networks and commercial activity to withstand the disproportionate impact that the economic disruption of COVID-19 is already having in these communities. 

MercadoLibre and eBay are competitive but require bank account information to process transactions. However, the significant majority of informal micro-business owners are unbanked rendering these services useless. Quipu’s blockchain-based local tokens provide a completely free digital means of exchange where none else exists. This makes Quipu the only marketplace platform offering a digital payments system to previously invisible, offline places. Unlike mobile money, users don't need to have fiat currency to access digital payments. The tokens are backed by the production capacity of the users. You can access other products and services in your local marketplace just by offering a product or service.  

Plus, marketplace platforms are not tailored to informal economies. For instance, business offerings are often located in areas without addresses. Quipu allows users to geolocate their business or describe directions in terms that only community members would understand. Additionally, transactions in informal economies are largely driven by bargaining. Marketplace platforms offer only static pricing. The Quipu marketplace allows buyers and sellers to chat, negotiate prices, and change prices in real time.

Microfinance organizations like Kiva, Branch, and Tala are competitive but invasively scan your personal data and still charge high rates. Not only does Quipu assess revenues, our marketplaces aggregate community commerce, a far more reliable assessment for economic health and creditworthiness. Quipu captures never before seen information on cumulatively massive informal economies and the micro-enterprises that facilitate them allowing us to mitigate risks of lending and drive down the cost of borrowing beyond our competitors.

Transactions on our platform are facilitated by a Proof of Stake blockchain-based community credits (local token system). They are the millions of previously offline & cash-based, low-value exchanges processed by micro-merchants who stand to benefit from bypassed mediation costs that make digital transactions unaffordable. Distributed ledger technologies in combination with ICT developments, such as web-based app platforms like Quipu, offer a low-cost, secure, and decentralized mechanism to develop a digital payments system where none else exists. 

The Quipu local token system is not a crypto currency. Local currencies have a limited area of use and there is no possible speculation since it has a fixed exchange rate with the Colombian peso and all incentives converge towards helping users spend (rather than accumulate) the tokens they hold.

Integrating blockchain technology to facilitate Quipu Market transactions enables capture of data automatically and transparently to measure and verify social impacts within community economies and the transactions they generate. 

Moreover, the data created by and stored in the blockchain can be leveraged as a community asset that can deliver  useful social and economic intelligence. For example, capturing a clear and robust picture of a community’s economy provides decision makers with the information necessary to channel appropriate policy and investment into underserved neighborhoods. We have the opportunity to create an unprecedented open data platform for local governments, NGOs, or international finance institutions to better understand the economies of previously opaque informal settlements.

Quipu combines multiple technologies and approaches that have been proven successful when seen individually: community currencies, the digitalization of informal economies and alternative credit scoring. 

There are more than 6,000 community currencies in the world, and they have proven to be more effective mechanisms for exchange in moments of economic crisis. Informal settlements live in a constant economic crisis. 

In addition, in Latin America, the Covid-19 crisis has driven a sharp increase in e-commerce, and digitalization of small businesses. The use of alternative transactions systems by governments in the disbursement of emergency subsidies also proves the need for innovations that can reach unbanked, informal businesses.

As to alternative credit scoring, there is an abundance of literature showing that usage patterns from digital marketplaces and other forms of non-financial factors improve the accuracy of risk models. Wang et al. (2013), Aitken (2017) and Roa et. al (2020) are some useful references. 

Please see a demo of our beta version here: www.vsp.quipumarket.com

We believe that communities are able to redesign their economies in ways that work for them. Our technology is developed to serve as a tool in that process. The marketplace provides visibility to businesses otherwise hidden, leveling the playing field in favor of those who are not well positioned in the community or are unknown to many. 

Our token-based transaction system increases their cashflow, enabling the occurrence of transactions that would otherwise not happen and allowing entrepreneurs to save their pesos or fiat currency for other expenses. At the same time, the local trading system allows the community to create and retain wealth locally, using their money to buy to their neighbors instead of external big corporations. 

In the back end, our system is generating a rich data ecosystem on informality that is non existent. Being consistent with our values and as a mission-driven organization, we leverage this data to provide just and equitable financial services so that those businesses can grow, create and retain wealth. This allows us to design new financial services, targeted for beneficiaries living in the informal economy, for example, we will allocate loans for productive economic activities that we can identify are missing locally.

We understand the systemic nature behind the structural issues of informal economies and we are building a platform that contributes to the redesign of those systems, instead of creating a solution that targets a symptom of larger issues. Our outcomes are measured by the amount of wealth that is created and retained by local micro-businesses and by the overall well-being of community members as they are able to transform their social capital into economic capital. 

The main beneficiaries of QUIPU are entrepreneurs from the informal economy, inhabitants of informal settlements and popular neighborhoods. Half of the beneficiaries live on less than a minimum wage (US $ 269/month). Most of them are women with businesses that are not visible since they sell from their homes.

Currently, we launched in Villas de San Pablo and we have 40 active users. This is a community of vulnerable populations, displaced and given a new home. In 2018, the neighborhood had built nearly 2,000 housing units for 10,000 people. Besides “prosumers,” Quipu benefits residents of informal neighborhoods who are potential customers of Quipu Market’s supply of goods and services. It provides these consumers with a tool to find accessible local offerings when they may have not known they existed. Plus, in visualizing the available products and services, consumers can identify possibilities for new markets. In the pilot implementation stage (next 4 months) it is expected to reach between 100 and 350 users, and in the escalation stage (next 8 months) it is expected to reach at least 10% of the population of the pilot neighborhood,1,000 users.

In one year, beside Villas de San Pablo, we expect to have a partnership with the City of Barranquilla to scale Quipu to five extra communities, of approximately 10K inhabitants each.

After 5 years of operation we project to host 500,000 users in 50 communities in Colombia, Argentina, Mexico and Brazil.

Our goal for the next year is to successfully carry out our pilot in Villas de San Pablo (Barranquilla), identify and launch Quipu Markets in at least 2 other cities in Colombia as well as launching our financial services by the end of 2021. To make this goal happen we will need to secure partnerships with at least one more institution. We are currently in conversation with the City Government of Barranquilla, the Chamber of Commerce and another big local Foundation. 

Within the next five years, we envision ourselves as transitioning to a regional neobank for the informal economy in Latin America, providing equitable financial services to micro-businesses and entrepreneurs, while allowing communities to redesign their local economies. Our team is well positioned to lead this effort given our experience working in informal settlements in Argentina, Colombia, Haiti and Puerto Rico, amongst other places.  

The massive economic disruption of COVID-19 is disproportionately affecting informal workers and micro-businesses. IDB estimates that in Latin America, 9 out of 10 informal workers will significantly lose their income, which will increase their relative poverty from 36 to 90%. Even though this makes for a stronger case for platforms such as Quipu, it constitutes a significant challenge in the next year in particular. 

Our model is contingent on having strong local partners on the ground, given that we are not developing technology that can be airdropped without a strong grassroot and community-based process beforehand. This implies we are faced with the challenge of finding the right partners that we share values with. This barrier however, can be overcome by finding regional partners that can leverage their networks, streamlining our partnership development process. 

Our technology is also facing some challenges as it pertains to the regulatory frameworks in Latin America. Despite being a leading region in smartphone penetration and connectivity, regulation still lags and is far from catching up to the speed of technological advance. Even though we are not a cryptocurrency, our trading system is easily mistaken as such and can potentially be flagged as problematic. Our strength in this case is that our marketplaces are place-based and follow a set of specific parameters that limit the possibilities of transforming tokens into cash.

As to the challenge of the effects of the COVID-19 crisis in informal workers, we plan to frame the use of Quipu as an economic recovery tool instead of a financial inclusion startup. Facing a sharp decrease in their income, entrepreneurs and microbusinesses can turn to Quipu as an alternative for increasing their cash flow, while local governments can also 

As to the challenge of finding the right partners, we have started to identify potential partners at the regional scale such as the UNDP Labs, the IDB, and others. Our pilot in Barranquilla is also allowing us to develop new methodologies for incentivizing the use of Quipu and developing the capacities within our partner organizations to do so. We are developing toolkits and guides that will make the implementation process more efficient, while maintaining our commitment to co-design and participatory methods. 

As to the regulatory challenges, we’ve inserted ourselves in the fintech ecosystem in Colombia and are participating in spaces discussing the regulatory needs and concerns. Our partnerships with organizations such as Minka, who is an active player in the transaction technology space, have also enhanced our understanding of the current limitations in regulations as well as the opportunities. Due to the COVID-19 emergency, governments are now far more open to other forms of transactions, particularly when it comes to subsidies allocations. 

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Full time staff: 4

Part-time staff: 2

Contractors: 2

Quipu is a team of Latin American born, MIT and Harvard graduates who have witnessed firsthand how marginalized communities struggle to survive. Our concerns about livelihoods for the people of our home countries is deeply rooted. We’ve learnt about the challenges facing informal settlements because we’ve worked with them. We share a unique understanding of the informal and formal cities, its inhabitants, built environment and economies, learned both through academia and a lot of fieldwork in different vulnerable communities of the global south. The team brings a diverse set of skills and backgrounds including urban planning, urban & informal economics, community engagement, UX design, architecture, computer science, and web development. We believe communities are capable of redesigning their economies. Now, we are out to build economic justice, one community at a time.

For our pilot, Quipu has secured partnerships with two organizations, Fundación Santo Domingo and the Inter-American Development Bank’s innovation Lab.These two organizations are making Quipu a reality in the Villas de San Pablo community in Barranquilla, Colombia. They’re helping finance the first 18 months of operation, onboard our initial users, administer the platform, and support users on the ground. 

We’ve also partnered with two technology companies in Colombia, Minka and Fourier Analytics. With the first, we partnered to develop our monetary design for the token system. They are a key player in developing real time transaction technology in Colombia. As winners of a recent challenge promoted by Fourier Analytics, a leading AI company in Colombia, we are partnering to fully develop our data ecosystem so that we can leverage it for providing access to equitable financial services. 

We also maintain our affiliation to MIT as part of DesignX’s alumni network and as collaborators of the MIT Community Innovators Lab. Most of our advisors come from the MIT ecosystem, particularly from the Sloan School of Management and the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. 

The Quipu Marketplace adds the following value to the population we serve:

Business Growth: With increased visibility and information about the behavior of their businesses, users reach more customers, increase income opportunities, and drive growth in sales. 

Cash Savings: All Quipu users are initially given and earn in quipus, interest-free community tokens/credits. They provide users the ability to buy and sell amongst each other without using cash enabling users to transact even when fiat currency fails to function as liquid utility and allowing them to save their money for expenses outside the community. 

Build Credit: Quipu data can fill in a massive information gap about borrowers and the economies they participate in. With credible information on borrowers and the aggregate financial health of a community on a macro-level, Quipu’s data can help microfinance organizations better understand the repayment capacity of their borrowers, mitigate the risks of lending, and minimize default rates on micro-loans. 

Political & Economic Intelligence: Capturing a clear and robust picture of a community’s economy provides decision makers with the information necessary to channel appropriate policy and investment into underserved neighborhoods.

Today informal economies are characterized by survival, subsistence living. But, removing these barriers to commerce enables micro-businesses to serve as the cornerstone of community economic development in low-income neighborhoods. It opens the doors to building better business, adding employment, and in doing so, generating wealth that can actually be retained in the areas it was created. 

Quipu has a diverse set of revenue streams to fund and grow our operations. Initially, we charge local stakeholder partners like microfinance organizations, local governments, or development banks a set-up fee to analyze the local market and train local Quipu ambassadors to assist in user adoption. The set-up fee covers the costs of implementation. After the digital market launches, the service is free to use. The users pay with their data. When Quipu starts scaling, we won’t need money from local partners.

During our first year of service, banks and microfinance organizations will pay Quipu for access to our proprietary financial scores that assess any given users’ creditworthiness. We will not be selling our algorithm, but rather the scores it produces for borrowers the financial institution is considering lending to. Because Quipu shares the risk of lending with the banks, the banks share the revenue earned from interest on loans with Quipu. After the first year of service, Quipu will begin disbursing its own loans and will earn revenue by collecting interest on its micro-loans. 

As Quipu grows and collects more data, we will launch a logistics intelligence platform to open another lucrative revenue stream. We plan to aggregate and anonymize financial information to sell market reports to governments, development agencies, and consumer goods companies who stand to benefit from information helping them better understand these communities and make evidence-based decisions on program implementation and evaluation.

Finding partnerships: SOLVE can connect us with regional partners that reach institutions and/or customers directly. SOLVE can help us frame the communication of our solution in an easy to understand way for each type of stakeholder. 

Thought leadership: We are thought leaders in the area of informality, technology and economic democracy. We have a unique academic and professional formation on this topics and we believe SOLVE can help us frame our knowledge in a way that can reach and educate decision makers, funders, ventures and academic institutions.

Revenue streams: We are looking for mentors that can help us design robust revenue streams while serving vulnerable population with products of excellence. We are looking for creative mentors that can help us navigate the challenge of building a social impact venture and generate revenue.

Funding: To be able to operate without external funding during the first years, we need to charge set-up fees to partner organizations. Although the impact of COVID in informal workers makes our platform more necessary than before, the budget of our potential partner institutions, such as local governments, have significantly reduced. With funding from SOLVE, we can cover the costs of implementing with new partners and provide an extremely useful economic recovery tool for citizens and their governments. We received interest from governments to use Quipu to disburse cash transfers in tokens. By doing so, we can guarantee the money is going to be spend in local businesses, supporting the recovery of local economies. 

We plan to scale in the Americas. To do so, we need to build strong partnerships with organizations that reach vulnerable populations, share our values and know the territories where they work. 

We also need to iterate our business model as we implement. We would like to count with mentors that can understand social impact business models and help us identify how, when and where to pivot our business model and revenue streams. 

Regarding the legal matters, we want to build a neo-bank that can serve informal workers. To reach that point, we will need a lot of advise on how to shape a revolutionary financial institution. 

In order to achieve scale, Quipu must grow its network of partnerships with local stakeholders in the communities we aim to serve. Our implementation model relies on establishing alliances with local governments, MFIs, and NGOs who help with implementation, user adoption, and platform administration throughout the communities they operate in. This way, instead of devoting the entirety of our focus towards targeting individual micro-business owners, which would be both cost and time expensive, we focus on local stakeholders who already work with our target users so we can onboard many merchants seamlessly. 

On the other hand, parenting with laboratories or initiatives within academia interested in learning from the platform generated data about informal economies with experience in currency sociology, collaborative finance, the solidarity economy, social technology, and impact investing, is of tremendous interest. 

We’ve also identified opportunities for partnerships with development agencies and international finance institutions: organizations executing extensive platforms for anti-poverty, financial inclusion, and development of civic technologies among others that have legitimacy in the communities where their programs operate and with proven experience implementing economic and social programs.

Informal settlement dwellers experience the same threats and challenges than refugees. Refugees are entrepreneurial by nature and build on their community networks to adapt to the new places where they reallocate. Quipu Market can support these type of communities by providing them with a platform where they can easily digitalize products/service they can offer, and, at the same time, build on their community ties to fulfill their needs and support their local economy. Quipu can also function as a window of their skills to the city and region that hosts refugees and that is willing to purchase their services/products. 

Quipu offers a way in which refugees can leverage on their social network (if they have one), integrate to their communities if they are newcomers, grow their local economies, create job for themselves and/or be visible to the city that hosts them. 

Quipu is a tool that provides self-resiliency and integration.

More than 60% of Quipu's users are women. Women are the ones that usually lead the economic sustainability of their families. They run businesses from home, as they allow them to take care of their family work. We believe women are the best entrepreneurs and that they can help their economies grow. Quipu, in its core, is a platform designed and used by women.

We would use the prize to create a specific adoption plan to support women's existing businesses to become digital and to encourage and train women without a business to start one. We want to support women in creating innovative local businesses that can benefit the whole local supply chain. We want to help them make wise decisions of what type of businesses to start, detecting which are the missing offer of their local economies.

We will use AI for: 1.building an unique identification system for unbanked population, 2.processing natural language from the chats to inform businesses behavior, 3. provide information to businesses about the local economy patterns and help them manage their businesses and make decisions, 4. suggest products/services to users based on behaviors on the app 5. suggest collective purchases based on expending patterns, 6. use trading networks to inform credit worthiness algorithm. 

Our team is prepared to use AI in the most innovative ways to serve Quipu users. Quipu's CTO, Viviana Siless, is Postdoctoral research fellow and Chair of Women in Science at The MGH/HST Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging. She is an expert in emerging technology and she is putting all the knowledge she gained at world lead institutions such as Harvard MGH, in service of building technology for the most vulnerable people in the world. 

We would use the prize to advance the development of the six usages of AI  described above.

The main beneficiaries of QUIPU are entrepreneurs from the informal economy, inhabitants of informal settlements and popular neighborhoods. Half of the beneficiaries live on less than a minimum wage (US $ 269/month). Most of them are women with businesses that are not visible since they sell from their homes and can offer all kinds of goods and services: ready-made food, ready-made shoes, meats and vegetables, toiletries and stationery, as well as beauty salon services , laundry, computer repair, etc. Despite generating large ecosystems on the fringes of the cities' main economy, these entrepreneurs lack tools to transform neighborhood subsistence economies into local productive economies.

The market is huge. Currently 1/3 of the world urban population lives in informal settlements. We describe these places in our cities as place-based informal economies, because they have their own local commercial networks. COVID crisis is having an extremely negative impact on informal workers, ILO estimates that 90% of informal workers (148m) will significantly lose their income due to the pandemic, increasing their relative poverty from 36 to 90%. At the same time, e-commerce have exponentially increased. But, the informal workers living in the slums, don't have a place in the fintech and e-commerce world. 

We are building an e-commerce platform for the globally underserved micro-entrepreneurs that their livelihoods depend in their day to day sales. They can also benefit from having digital platforms design for their needs. Quipu sees the opportunity in uplifting entire local economies, more than tackling individual needs. 

With Future Planet Capital investment we would roll out the first Quipu loans for micro-business growth based on the data we collected about the local informal economies behavior.