The Growth Platform

At the Growth Platform, we enable last-mile credit delivery by digitally including Nigerians at the bottom of the economic pyramid who are semi-literate or illiterate and lack any form of identification or collateral required for lending.

Firstly, we provide applicants with biometric identification and the nationally accepted BVN which identifies and includes them as members of the society through our enumeration procedures.

Secondly, we avail our beneficiaries of collateral-free and interest-free credit through our human banks located all over the country who onboard them at their places of business, upload their loan requests to the central database, and once approved, pay their money through mobile wallets without their needing to visit any banks.

Lastly, our millions of beneficiaries are equipped with financial literacy skills like recordkeeping, budgeting, credit, and money management to maximize their loans, grow their businesses, graduate them to more formal lending and lift them out of poverty.

Nigeria currently ranks as the poverty capital of the world, according to the World Poverty Clock, with 60% of its population (92 million people) living below the $2.50/day poverty line and a life expectancy of only 54.33 years. Nigeria's average household size is 5.2 where the average income earners per household are 1.6.

56 million of Nigeria’s active poor who are capable of commercial activity to better their lives lack access to funding, financial histories, or formal identification that make it easier to access traditional financial services. They are also mostly unbanked with their “economic value” unable to compete with formal trades and industries as the cost to aggregate them is impossible without innovation. This has caused traditional lenders (e.g. banks and microfinance) to disregard these 56 million microenterprises leaving them stuck in a poverty cycle. Only 0.4% of formal loans or credit in the past 3 years have gone to this demographic due to their lack of formal transaction records/credit histories and collateral. With the hardest-hit segment being women, it is a brewing crisis.

The Growth Platform solves the problem of last-mile credit delivery to this demographic of over 50 million Nigerians living at the bottom of the pyramid.

The Growth Platform is a solution aimed at reversing this poverty crisis exponentially by utilizing a process and technical innovation that uses big data and technology to break the barrier of identification, provide access to capital, and formalize these unbanked and underserved members of society.

This is being done by upturning traditional financial service (identity, physical infrastructure, bank branches), and radically deconstructing it into 21,000 roving agents (“human banks”) who are trained and equipped with our proprietary mobile technologies to serve beneficiaries directly in their communities with credit and financial literacy. Beneficiaries are availed life-saving, collateral-free, and interest-free credit (as low as $20, and as high as $600 sometimes) for their microenterprises, while also building up their credit histories to have unencumbered access to future higher credit. 

The Growth Platform has been used as a vehicle to successfully pilot, scale, and deliver grants and funding programs to Nigerian MSMEs in partnership with the Bank of Industry, the Federal Government of Nigeria, and the WorldBank.

Our innovative last-mile credit-delivery system addresses the UN 2030 development goal that aims to eradicate poverty and hunger as access to credit leads to improved economic outcomes and is beneficial overall for the economy's informal sector. 

Our last-mile credit-delivery solution serves everyday hardworking Nigerians who do not shy away from labor but however, find themselves at the bottom of the economic pyramid. They are hardworking and talented beyond compare in tanning, farming, weaving, sewing, trading, etc. 

To understand the needs of this demographic, we conducted an extensive field study (with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation), engaging and polling poor communities directly. A total of over 50,000 were polled via randomized sampling. 85% of these individuals and households reported: “access to finance for their business” in their top three challenges. Essentially, if they had this access – they would be able to take better control of their lives. Poverty is not a handicap, it can be reversed. 

The Growth Platform first targets this demographic of 56 million Nigerians who are poor, traditionally left behind, but are confirmed as commercially able. Some of them even have an active micro-trade. In parallel, the platform plans to scale up to target the same demographic in the rest of the African continent (we have received interest in our work from the nations of Ghana and Rwanda).

According to the EFInA 2018 Access to Financial Services Survey, 68.9% of Nigerian adults have access to mobile phones, presenting a unique opportunity for deepening financial inclusion and reaching the unbanked through USSD, SMS, and other accessible mobile telephony technologies which we have adopted. We also, currently leverage mobile wallet platforms to disburse loans directly to beneficiaries. 

The Platform's approach to lending and financial inclusion is innovative as technology has been used to;

* Operate a Bank Verification Number system that acts as digital collateral and encourages repayment compliance.

* Geofence and tag loan beneficiaries by banking agents to ensure accurate delivery of credit to the last mile.

* Incorporate facial recognition into the biometric registration phase to avoid duplication.

* Capture data in an exhaustive manner such that, previously un-included people are currently included financially by the largest agent banking network in Africa.

* Automate the entire loan process from agreement signings to disbursements and repayments ensuring that beneficiaries are able to repay their loans by simply using recharge vouchers on their mobile or through our easy-to-locate human banks present in their localities.

The Growth Platform through its programs is currently on course to provide economic security to Nigerians in need and has achieved significant female inclusion in its disbursements as 55.41% of its 4.4 million loan beneficiaries are female. With over 4 million direct beneficiaries of our project and counting, we are still quite aggressive about continuous improvement. Our human banks not only serve beneficiaries daily with our interest-free credit product but also provide constant FINANCIAL LITERACY training. They learn basic savings habits, book-keeping, pooled inventory, and are provided micro-insurance to better their lives and protect their livelihoods.

 The Growth Platform is a process innovation in response to a brewing crisis. It is a direct attack on poverty through economic empowerment. The human bank comes to you and provides you with credit, financial literacy, ease of commerce, and a better life. A defining feature of the project is its scale of impact and its even bigger potential.  

Today we have over 7million applicants profiled and are on a mission to digitally include 15 million beneficiaries with access to capital by 2025. This aligns with the Solve Digital Inclusion challenge that aims to create equal access and economic inclusion.

The Growth Platform is at the Scale stage having grown to cover the 36 states of Nigeria and the FCT. Its addressable market continues to grow and expand within the African region and beyond.

The Growth platform currently houses over 7 million applicants and over 4 million beneficiaries of the various programs it has delivered funding to and has successfully disbursed loans worth approximately N37bn ($95,000,000) in total. These are verifiable statistics that have been achieved by leveraging a robust network of 21,000 agents ("human banks") deployed across 53 regional agent networks nationwide with a 99.4% deep local coverage. Human banks, equipped with our mobile technology solutions are able to work as the Platform's intermediaries at the lowest level to ensure deep penetration, maximum inclusion, and representation in far-flung areas and remote villages across the country. 

The Growth Platform's key innovation is in utilizing its human banks (agents) to reach previously unreached Nigerians living at the bottom of the pyramid with credit for their microenterprise through technology.  We meet them right where they are with a robust technological infrastructure (mobile devices that collect their information and route same to the central database for processing) that enumerates them by collecting their biometric data and photo images, verifies same data on our system to ensure that there is proof of life, that the customers agreed to the loans, and that there are no duplications before the disbursement process where the beneficiaries receive their loans begin.  

KYC, beneficiary consent, fraud checks, face ID checks, and agent management are carried out effectively using the big data collected or generated daily for millions of our applicants. We also utilize this big data to predict loan behaviors and are therefore able to better profile beneficiaries, influence repayment, keep robust customer profiles, and build credit histories to achieve financial inclusion. 

This out-of-the-box approach is being adopted by mobile money solutions that identify customers with their registered phone numbers and transact with them using the same form of identification. Innovative Fintech understands that there has to be a workaround solution to waiting for the customers to come to you at the bank, we have to do more and create more tools to reach them where they are in order to successfully include this often forgotten segment of the economy financially and improve their lives.

 The Growth Platform currently houses 7 million applicants and serves 4.4 million beneficiaries with microcredit of which 55% are female and 45% male. In the next year, we aim to profile an additional 5 million applicants and reach 3 million more beneficiaries with access to credit through our GEEP, SEEP, World Bank partnered programs.

The Growth Platform aims to be a breakthrough in the area of data science and technology as it seeks to digitally profile and identify 25 million Nigerians directly as applicants. We, in turn, aim to serve 15 million more beneficiaries with credit in this 5 year period and over 52 million indirectly as dependents of the beneficiaries in 5 years. 

The large population in Nigeria creates an opportunity for data science models to be deployed and be re-provisioned for similar terrains across the region. This adds instant value to the world of data science and big data as it relates to leveraging data science for a deeper understanding of the lives of the poor & vulnerable and the eventual eradication of poverty.

The specific function of the Growth Platform and other technology milestones is to provide a cumulative delivery of the overall program mandate which is financial inclusion. It has already received both local and global recognition as one of the key strategies for deepening financial inclusion and lifting vulnerable socio-economic segments out of poverty, thereby ensuring its nationwide adoption and overall sustainability. 

The Growth Platform ensures milestone performance measuring and program sustainability through the following means: 

1. Solution Audits – (Model Efficiency Indicators i.e. Precision, Recall, Accuracy, F1 score) 

2. Performance Reviews – (User Adoption, Turn Around on Requests, Channel surge, etc) 

3. Impact Assessments – (Profiling Accuracy, Intervention timeliness, Beneficiary testimonials, etc) 

The Milestones to be measured as program performance indicators include: 

* 75% model efficiency (as measured from Precision, Recall, Accuracy and beneficiary testimonies) 

* 50% uptake in Natural Language Processing (NLP) channel with a focus on Self Service for the least literate beneficiary segment 

* 50% shrinkage in resolution time for queries escalated to the Platform's Contact Center 

* Data-driven provision for at least two more financial interventions per beneficiary 

* Increase in mobile wallet usage and bank account adoption.

* Beneficiary's micro-enterprise growth

The Growth Platform is domiciled in the Bank of Industry (BOI), the oldest development finance institution in Nigeria. The bank provides the platform with a regulatory license cover, while also housing and insuring the pool of funds received from providers of capital we make available to the poor through our project. 

The Growth Platform is however operated as an independent project within BOI, and enjoys autonomy in building its team, platform design, and continued innovation under the guidance of its Chief Operating Officer Uzoma Nwagba.

The Growth Platform team is made up of about 33 full-time staff, 21,000 on-field agents, and 11 service providers.

The Platform's management team is adequately skilled to oversee and execute this Credit-Delivery & Financial Inclusion program as seen below. 

Team Member: Toyin Adeniji (F) 

Executive Director, Microenterprise, Bank of Industry 

28 years experience in finance, advisory & securities at the World Bank. Fully grasps the issue of financial inclusion in the region. 

Team Member: Uloma Ike (F) 

Group Head, Microenterprise, Bank of Industry 

Mason Fellow, global finance expert and gender-based financial inclusion activist. 

Team Member: Uzoma Nwagba (M) 

Chief Operating Officer, Growth Platform 

Ex Product Manager at Microsoft; Harvard MBA; Ex Analyst at Goldman Sachs; 

Desmond Tutu Leadership Fellow. Understands data-driven product development, data systems &  processes. 

Team Member: Aisha Abdullahi (F) 

Head of Delivery & Execution, Bank of Industry. 

19 years experience in the Nigerian Banking industry and versed in financial inclusion, credit risk management, financial analysis & reporting. 

Team Member: Oyekanmi Oluwagbamila (M) 

Data Science Lead 

Expert software developer, data scientist, telecommunications & security expert with 20+ years of experience. Developed/deployed several industry solutions including deep learning data/computer vision solution for quality validation and analytics of over 120million demographics and biometric subscriber registrations in Telecom Networks in Nigeria.

These diverse experiences of this management team and that of the rest of the youthful team they lead whose mean age is 27, come in handy in our daily interactions with beneficiaries and the design of the platform. Our multi-lingual round-the-clock customer support team is equipped to interact with beneficiaries from across the country in their local dialects.

Nigeria is a diverse nation with people from different tribes and ethnicities who have all been accommodated in our organization. Our agent network is diverse as agents are recruited from among the local populace or states wherein they operate hence their ability to communicate with beneficiaries in the languages they understand which helps us enumerate, verify, and onboard these applicants with relative ease. 

The multi-lingual nature of our agents also comes in handy as applicants and beneficiaries alike are able to interact with them, receive updates on issues, receive assistance with purchasing mobile recharge for repayment purposes. 

Our round-the-clock customer support team is also multi-lingual in Igbo, Hausa, Yoruba, Efik, Ibibio to support major local dialects in Nigeria. We are working hard to include more local languages in our support offering for better inclusion and more reach of this demographic in languages they are more comfortable communicating in so we leave no one behind.

Our general team also reflects gender diversity and inclusion both in the management structure and the rest of the team as women are fully represented in management. Women & youth also make up a higher number of our agent network as we are deliberate about giving them more opportunities for employment and economic growth to aid inclusion, reduce gender gaps.

Our project is currently at a tipping point as we have proven the model, that it is indeed possible to intervene in Africa's poverty challenge at a large scale and pull millions of people out of poverty. We have onboarded 7 million microenterprises in poor communities, serving 4.4 million of them with life-saving credit that has transformed them from struggling poor to commercially active. However, we seek to radically accelerate our impact by targeting 25 million people over the next 5 years. It may sound unbelievable, but this was exactly how 4 million-plus beneficiaries sounded when we were at 130,000 beneficiaries 3 years ago. 

Our capacity for growth is exponential and we seek a global network of bold thinkers and doers, people tackling the world's toughest problems, and with whom we can cross-pollinate the best of ideas in development finance, innovation, and in making an impact which being a member of the Solve community guarantees us.  

The Digital Inclusion Challenge also offers us access to funding to innovate further - especially with processing local languages to enable poor people to access financial services by simple voice talks on the phone. This would more actively support our operation to expand into multiple African countries where partners have reached out to us to replicate the successes of the platform in delivering Financial Inclusion to their countries. The prize will also give us the flexibility to continue to develop new products for the underserved. 

We are constantly evolving our technology, staying abreast of the most efficient ways to manage, mine, and analyze data for accurate credit decisions, managing our fast-growing operation of human banks, and embedding big data and machine learning to automate more of our processes. The next level of our advancement should include voice-based access i.e., allowing our candidates to simple tasks (e.g. balance enquiries, loan requests) by simply talking to phone voice prompts in local languages of multiple countries. This requires Natural Language Processing, a technology we are keenly following and seeking to adopt. 

 Technology support from Solve will enable us to achieve significant strides in this area, amongst others. The Solve network will also expose us to a set of global resources in M&e, media and branding that will even further catapult our platform's solution and impact to the global stage. 

We will like to partner with NGOs, Private Capital banks, International Governments, Innovators, Educational Institutions requiring Africa-focused data, etc.

Examples; The United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF), The Mastercard Foundation, USAID, European Union. These institutions and similar ones can partner with us to deliver development programs in Nigeria and Africa using our Platform's infrastructure, data, and reach.

The Growth Platform equips its agents with mobile technology tools to aid the capture of applicant's biometric data (biodata information, geolocation, and geofenced imagery) which is uploaded to the Platform's database for verification and disbursement of loans if the applicant's request is approved.

With the HP Prize for advancing digital equity, we will recruit more agents and train them to be technologically savvy in order to carry out the above-listed services for the Growth Platform. Our agent network currently sits at 21,000 male & female agents serving over 7 million applicants/ 4.4 million beneficiaries and we will like to scale this further by adding about 10,000 new agents in the next year.

This will help reduce youth unemployment in Nigeria as well as improve digital inclusion with the acquisition of transferable digital skills that will keep them employable in this century.

At the Growth Platform, we are focused on current intelligence and the future;  and spend time delivering models for intuitive what-if analytics for the program. We use as our base, big data from over 10,000 data points derived from applicants, characterized by the three V’s: Volume, Variety, and Velocity in building our algorithms and models. Our team of cutting-edge data scientists, work using machine learning/AI, to create models that automatically self-improve, noting and implementing optimizations from the learnings. 

Our Platform's intelligence system (GEEP Nerve) uses predictive modeling to predict repayment rates and likely defaults as valuable beneficiary information is picked up when the Nerve takes all the enumeration, verification, disbursement, and repayment data about beneficiaries and runs them through logic. Patterns are derived and trends predicted which help our collections team with repayments in recovering loans in order to revolve the funds and reach more beneficiaries with access to needed credit for their microenterprises.