Book|Keeper MSME digital inclusion App.

Micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs), including women-owned MSMEs, face a staggering $8.1 trillion “Financing Gap” globally, hindering growth, profitability, job creation, and the ability to serve low-income communities (“Performance Gap”). A root cause of the Performance Gap and Financing Gap is MSMEs’ inability to collect, derive actionable intelligence from, and share with lenders sufficient, timely, and reliable financial and operational data, analytics, and financial statements (“Data Gap”), widening MSME Performance Gap and Financing Gap. With an intuitive and gamified interface, Book|Keeper, our digital inclusion tool designed with significant input from Bangladeshi women, bridges the Data Gap for underserved, underbanked, and digitally excluded MSMEs with minimal conventional literacy and no accounting literacy. By bridging the Data Gap, Book|Keeper can significantly narrow 1) Performance Gap by providing actionable business insights to MSME owners and 2) Financing Gap by scaling higher quality MSME credit risk assessment by lenders at a reduced cost.

The World Bank estimates a staggering $8.1 trillion MSME “Financing Gap” in the developing countries, with women-owned MSMEs accounting for an outsized share. MSME Financing Gap creates an MSME “Performance Gap” by hindering growth, profitability, and job creation by MSMEs, who create 90% of new jobs globally. MSME Performance Gap, exacerbated by the pandemic, inhibits poverty alleviation, a critical U.N. Sustainable Development Goal, recently exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The root cause of the Financing Gap is the MSMEs’ inability to collect, organize, analyze and disclose sufficient, timely, and reliable financial and operational data, financial statements, and supporting documents (“Data Gap”), which impedes lenders’ efforts to assess MSME creditworthiness, exaggerates MSME credit risk, and discourages lenders from offering affordable loans to MSMEs. The Data Gap also deprives MSMEs of gaining actionable business insights needed to narrow the Performance Gap and create more jobs to enable their communities to achieve UN certain SDG goals.  

The problem we are solving is how to rapidly, affordably, and securely bridge the Data Gap for underserved, underbanked, and digitally excluded MSMEs, especially women-owned MSMEs, to narrow the staggering $8.1 trillion MSME Financing Gap and MSME Performance Gap to accelerate the achievement of UN SDG goals.

Our solution is a cloud-based multi-currency, multi-country, secure mobile App hosted on AWS. Utilizing an intuitive UI/UX interface, Book|Keeper enables underserved, underbanked, and digitally excluded MSMEs, especially women-owned MSMEs with limited literacy and no accounting knowledge, to bridge their Data Gap to access affordable finance that supports growth, profitability, and job creation. The App has already demonstrated the potential for mass adoption and scaling by women-owned MSMEs in Bangladesh who operate primarily in informal economies and remain mostly unbanked.

MSMEs enter on mobile smartphones operational and financial data on their business transactions with customers, suppliers, service providers, etc. by answering intuitive and straightforward questions displayed by the App in a gamified manner. MSMEs also upload supporting documents like receipts and invoices.

The App automatically converts the transactional data entered by MSMEs into bookkeeping entries (debits and credits), which can be instantly exported to lenders as CSV files. The App will soon add features to convert the bookkeeping entries into 1) financial statements to share with lenders and 2) highly visual, easy-to-understand, and actionable business analytics to help MSMEs gain crucial insights to grow profitably and employ people.

Our solution serves the base of the pyramid segment in low- and middle-income countries by accelerating job creation by underserved, underbanked, and digitally excluded MSMEs, especially women-owned MSMEs, to achieve certain UN SDG goals 1, 2, 3 5, 8, and 10. 

According to the United Nations Conference of Trade and Development, “MSMEs represent about 90% of businesses and more than 50% of employment worldwide; formal MSMEs contribute to 40% of GDP in emerging economies, and the number is considerably higher when informal ones are included.” They are the foundation of developing economies. Still, they face several complex challenges to economic and digital inclusion. Our solution helps MSMEs bridge the staggering Financing Gap of $8.1 trillion, the amount by which the demand for capital exceeds its supply.

In Bangladesh, where we recently worked for nearly 2 years on a USAID-funded “feed the future” project, MSMEs, including machinery service providers (MSPs) to smallholder farmers, consistently cite the Financing Gap as primarily responsible for their Performance Gap. This was recently validated by ASPEN’s consulting project under CSISA MEA in Bangladesh. The low availability and high cost of finance experienced by MSP/MSMEs reduce the supply of agricultural equipment (combines, tractors, etc.) and spare parts and increase the MSP/MSMEs’ debt service burden. The result to smallholder farmers is the reduced availability and higher cost to rent farm equipment and parts, reducing agricultural production and the farmers’ income.

According to SmartMech, an innovative Bangladeshi startup that owns and rents out a small fleet of combines, “less than 7% of cereal crops in Bangladesh are planted or harvested mechanically. This situation persists despite a chronic scarcity of wage labor during peak season. The use of manual labor for planting and harvesting has decided disadvantages as it costs roughly twice as much per acre as renting a machine and takes 2 to 3 days versus an hour or less. Finding farm labor during peak season can be fiercely competitive and creates stress and uncertainty for farmers whose entire crop is at risk if not planted or harvested on time.  The growing demand for mechanized farm services has resulted in the emergence of a local machinery service providers (MSP) industry. MSPs are typically MSMEs who acquire machines and provide fee-based services within their area. These individuals are constrained by lack of finance (for both machine purchase and working capital).”

The low availability and high cost of finance of MSP/MSMEs increase their debt service burden, which adversely affects smallholder farmers by increasing their cost of renting and reducing the supply of mechanized farm services from MSPs, adversely affecting smallholder farmers’ productivity, income, and living standards. The high cost and reduced availability of finance experienced by non-MSP MSMEs in the agricultural value chain have similar adverse effects on smallholder farmers’ productivity, income, and living standards.

We see an opportunity to bridge the MSME Performance Gap by narrowing the Financing Gap by reducing the MSME Data Gap due to their lack of financial literacy and the lack of easy-to-use tools to capture, organize, analyze and share data. The Data Gap reduces the lenders’ ability to assess credit risk, thus reducing their willingness to provide loans at an affordable interest rate. Thus, the Performance Gap and Financing Gap of underserved MSMEs can be reduced by bridging their Data Gap. The outcome for low-income segments of our population, including smallholder farmers, is the greater availability of jobs and mechanized farm services at a reduced cost, respectively.

The MSME Performance Gap caused by the Financing Gap is not due to a lack of capital but by a market dysfunction caused by the Data Gap, i.e., the inability of MSMEs to provide sufficient, timely, and reliable information needed by lenders to assess MSME credit risk, which drives the price of capital, commonly referred to as risk premium. The lack of data to determine MSME risk premium prevents lenders and investors from granting MSMEs the business capital they need. In other words, the lack of MSME data exacerbates their Financing Gap.

Throughout his 35-year career, our Founder and Book|Keeper’s principal architect, Razi Amin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ra...), focused on bridging the Financing Gap by raising capital from the international capital markets, the deepest source of capital. 

Our Founder’s inspiration to address and solve multifaceted issues that affect the countless number of underserved segments of our society can be attributed to his adolescent experience during the bloody civil war that led to the birth of Bangladesh and the time he spent with his family as refugees in Afghanistan after fleeing Pakistan through the Tora Bora mountains. These experiences honed in our Founder’s instincts to identify problems, ideate pragmatic solutions with intended beneficiaries (such as Bangladesh Women Chamber of Commerce & Industry), and form alliances with those who share a common vision to change the trajectory of MSMEs, such as USAID, International Finance Corporation (IFC) and the World Bank. Book|Keeper is a reflection of this approach.

IFC reports that women own 50% of microenterprises and 59% of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in East Asia and the Pacific. Women in South Asia own 10% of microenterprises and 8% of SMEs. In lower-income countries in Asia and the Pacific, and globally, a higher proportion of women-owned businesses are established out of necessity due to a lack of employment opportunities.

A typical user of Book|Keeper App is the owner of an underserved, underbanked, and digitally excluded MSME, especially a woman-owned MSME, which employs people from the low-income segments of our population and which is financially responsible for its dependents, who depend on her commanding an income from working in industries such as handicrafts, agriculture, jute products, garments and accessories, retail, tailoring, beauty, health and related services, electronics/IT and software, and online businesses. She comes from impoverished communities in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and throughout South Asia and Africa, which often impose social norm constraints on women. She may be subject to laws and regulations that discriminate against female business owners, excluding them from beneficial networks and exposing them to gender violence. She has limited access to physical markets and technology, lacks access to startup capital, and has insufficient education and skillset to start, manage, and grow a business.

As a direct result of COVID-19, underserved and female-owned MSMEs are incredibly vulnerable to negative social and economic impacts. With many having to restrict their business activities, there is an increased risk of loss of income, poverty, inequality, food scarcity, and long-term effects on health outcomes for them and their families.

Book|Keeper App empowers MSMEs through its digital bookkeeping solution by helping them manage their operations and access the finance they need to grow their businesses, even if they don’t have formal education or accounting knowledge. The Apps intuitive interface allows women to enter data on routine business transactions and automatically does the bookkeeping for them. As a result, MSME owners and managers can track the financial health of their business and share important financial information with potential lenders and investors who can better assess the viability of the enterprise based on factual information.

By digitizing their data, female MSMEs can better control their business and finances. This technology opens the door for greater financial inclusion and access to new solutions through digital technology, including loans, product acquisition, and capacity-building measures. As more women use digital tools like Book|Keeper, they will experience increased gender equity, improved financial returns, reduced poverty, and contribute to the overall economy.

In addition to the direct benefits that Book|Keeper provides MSMEs, our financial intervention also helps further the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. MSMEs supply more than half of GDP globally. Having access to financial services and technology strengthens emerging enterprises and their ability to access credit. Because the App allows MSMEs to participate in economic activities and obtain the financing they need, MSMEs can expand their capacity to create new jobs for millions of unemployed and contribute to poverty alleviation. According to a UNDESA report, “MSMEs have the potential to adopt actions in their business practices to contribute to the goal. They can set and enforce strict policies and practices that do not discriminate against the poor and eliminate wage inequality. MSMEs can also recruit, train, and employ local community members, including those living in poverty, and integrate them into the MSME value chain.”

Book|Keeper is not just a digital inclusion tool but a financial literacy app. The App serves as a fun, intuitive, and interactive way to learn about accounting concepts. Addressing these skill gaps and facilitating new learning experiences also contributes to equitable education and business opportunities for all.

Those MSMEs that work in the agricultural sector will gain new opportunities from using our financial tool, directly contributing to food security, improved nutrition, and sustainable agriculture, thus alleviating hunger and improving overall health outcomes for those living in developing countries. We have seen this occur as a result of our collaboration with USAID in Bangladesh.

By facilitating financial inclusion and improving women’s access to economic resources and technology, Book|Keeper empowers women and promotes their right to engage in business and economic activity, helping female MSMEs bridge the gender and inequality gap.

Our proposed social enterprise model aims to improve the Performance Gap of MSMEs by bridging their Financing Gap through the reduction of their Data Gap with our digital financial inclusion tool. This is intended to ultimately benefit the low-income population, including smallholder farmers, by lifting their disposable income by increasing the availability and reducing the cost, of renting mechanized services to improve their productivity. Book|Keeper helps reduce the Data Gap by enabling MSMEs to effortlessly enter the data related to their daily business transactions (buy, sell, etc.) by responding to a few intuitive, gamified, standardized, and repetitive questions. Users will pay an affordable monthly subscription fee to be determined after a free trial period to be determined. We will make use of available digital sales and marketing channels, including mobile, WhatsApp, email, YouTube, and Facebook to reach our target users.

For example, we will deploy online user awareness campaigns among MSMEs directly and through influencers and aggregators  (NGOs, advocacy organizations, trade associations, etc.). These campaigns will make MSMEs aware of how their Financing Gap and Performance Gap can be mitigated by bridging their Data Gap through the use of Book|Keeper.

We will also deploy lender awareness campaigns among banks, non-bank financial institutions, and microfinance institutions directly and through influencers and aggregators. Lenders will become aware of how Book|Keeper can bridge the Data Gap of MSMEs, allowing lenders to rapidly scale credit risk assessment and loan disbursement at a reduced cost.

In addition, we will deploy online user adoption campaigns among MSMEs directly and through influencers and aggregators. MSMEs will download, sign-on, and register on Book|Keeper.

We have already deployed online training of trainers (ToT) and training of users (ToU) directly and through influencers and aggregators.

We plan to deploy an online helpdesk to offer user support to MSMEs staffed by business school students under our supervision.

We will also deploy software customization to increase the effectiveness of Book|Keeper for MSMEs by automatically generating financial statements and business analytics with data visualization and digitally sharing them with lenders. This will dramatically improve the cost and time associated with loan application, credit risk assessment, loan disbursement, and securitization in the capital markets. The benefits all these features will accrue to MSMEs serving the low-income segment of the population, including smallholder farmers, by bridging the Financing Gap.

Book|Keeper offers MSMEs a private, anonymized (via a Google account), and scalable (powered by AWS) digital financial tool to bridge their Financing Gap by enabling MSMEs to bridge their data gap, seamlessly providing the information lenders need to accurately evaluate credit risk and facilitate loan approvals. Lenders cite the data gap as the most critical impediment to granting loans needed by MSMEs to thrive in a cash-based and digital economy.

Book|Keeper was designed for those with limited literacy and no accounting knowledge, from feedback received from underserved MSMEs in the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, and, recently, women-owned MSMEs.

Book|Keeper was designed with extensive input from the Bangladesh Women Chamber of Commerce and Industry (BWCCI), which has approximately 5,500 members. We are currently training BWCCI members to use the App. A SOLVE award will help us scale the adoption and training of the App beyond BWWCI members to other women entrepreneurs in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Nepal, Africa, and the Middle East.

The pandemic has limited networking opportunities and has made it harder for female entrepreneurs to obtain business advice in these trying times. In Bangladesh, we are forming partnerships with universities that are considering providing academic credit and community service credit to their students who train and onboard five to 10 MSMEs with our support. This affords students an up-close opportunity to apply accounting theories in a real business environment, improving the students’ prospects for conventional jobs after graduation or starting their own business.

Our innovation comes from maximizing the users' benefit by 1) eliminating the need for advanced conventional literacy or any financial literacy by guiding users through simple questions to gather data on their business transactions and 2) packing the utility for the users by instantly converting user data into bookkeeping entries (debits and credits). The App appeals to small business owners' instincts by encouraging them to enter ordinary business data, whether related to cash or digitized transactions, by responding to intuitive buttons displayed in a gamified manner on their mobile smartphone devices. MSMEs immediately benefit from the real-time display of bookkeeping entries, [financial statements], and [visualized business insights] to be deployed soon. These benefits have been validated by the overwhelming “…super easy to use…” response from MSME members of the Bangladesh Women Chamber of Commerce & Industry. What’s more, our solution does not require users to subscribe to other digital tools such as mobile financial services or point-of-sale devices. Thus, underserved MSMEs who run purely cash-based businesses can benefit from the digital financial inclusion afforded by our solution.

Our App solves the most significant problem globally faced by MSMEs, especially for women-owned MSMEs – the lack of access to affordable finance due to the staggering gap between the data required by lenders to assess MSME credit risk and the inability to collect, organize and provide such data due to the lack of an affordable easy-to-learn and easy-to-use digital financial inclusion tool such as Book|Keeper. 

Our App currently has 287 users, according to Google Analytics.

Within one year, we plan to increase our user-base to 5,000 MSMEs in Bangladesh, India Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Nepal through digital marketing and collaborations with aggregator institutions like advocacy organizations (BWCCI), foundations (SME Foundation of Bangladesh), trade associations (Chambers of Commerce and Industry in various cities), NGOs (BRAC), microfinance institutions (Grameen Bank), banks, and non-bank finance companies.

Within five years, we plan to increase our user-base to one million MSMEs in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Egypt, The Democratic Republic of Congo, South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Algeria, Sudan, and Morocco. We plan to achieve this scale by collaborating with bilateral and multilateral development finance and aid institutions who prioritize MSME access to finance, especially among women, in our target countries.

Over a 13-year period, our Founder worked with institutions including the World Bank, IFC, and USAID. His prior experience across Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, the Middle East, Africa, and continuing relationships with these institutions will continue to be leveraged successfully in our outreach to a million MSMEs by year five. 

We will also leverage our Founder’s 25-year experience in mobilizing $35+ billion from the international capital markets to mobilize a significant amount of capital from the global capital markets, which we plan to tap into by securitizing the loans made to our MSME customers. The availability of long-term, affordable capital, should accelerate the growth of our user-base and make Book|Keeper financially sustainable.     

Our impact goals align strongly with UN SDGs 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, and 10. Our primary intervention to achieve these goals focuses on equipping underserved, underbanked, and digitally excluded MSMEs with a digital financial inclusion tool to bridge their staggering $8.1 trillion MSME Financing Gap, which impedes their growth, profit, and job creation.

We launched the beta version of our App in May 2021 and thus don’t have a lot of data, but we’re using Google analytics to track some of the impact measures. We’re developing capabilities to capture more measures with time. We’re also collaborating with universities to compare impact measures of our MSME customers with those who do not use our App.

Direct impact measures - those we can directly influence and measure:

# users (287 registered users as of now)

# active users (184 active users, 14-day average)

Revenue growth

Income growth

Employment growth

# loan applicants

Indirect impact measures - those we can indirectly influence and measure:

# loans approved

Loan approval rate

Loan disbursement amount

Loan repayment amount

Debt to EBITDA

Loan tenor

Loan default rate

Loan recovery rate

Time from loan application to disbursement

Indirect measures not directly attributable to our interventions:

SDGs 1:

SDG 2

SDG 3

SDG 5

SDG 8

SDG 10

Senior Team – 3

Fulltime staff – 1

Parttime contractors – 4

Founded in 2009, ASPEN Capital Solutions LLC is an advisory firm with a reputation for integrity, independence, and performance. We provide our clients with actionable advice and implementation services in restructuring, recapitalization, capital management, liquidity management, and capital markets solutions. Our clients benefit from our team’s diverse experience in leadership positions in managing financial, commercial, strategic, and geopolitical risks at major global financial institutions.

Before their affiliation with ASPEN Capital, our team members served in senior and leadership positions at major global banks, family offices, and institutional investors, where they advised, sourced, structured, distributed, or managed $100+ billion of traditional and alternative investments for clients, including governments, corporations, financial institutions, investment funds, family offices, sovereign wealth funds, central banks and universities across the globe.

Project lead, Razi Amin, has 35+ years of leadership and senior experience in debt capital markets, structured finance, ESG-compliant impact investments, and financial capacity building for women-owned businesses and micro-entrepreneurs in the agricultural sector under USAID projects. 

He has been responsible for mobilizing $35+ billion of funding from the U.S., European, and Asian capital markets and development finance institutions (DFIs) through high grade, high yield, asset-backed and structured bonds, loans, and credit derivatives. 

Razi recently served as a senior advisor to the chief investment officer of IFC, a member of The World Bank Group.  He focused on sourcing, structuring, and investing in special purpose financing vehicles to support debt resolution and MSME lending by financial institutions in the Middle East & Africa region.

At ASPEN Capital Solutions LLC, we believe in diversity, equity, and inclusion to maximize value for stakeholders, including our customers, investors, employees, and community. We are stronger as a team when we welcome diverse perspectives, experiences, and approaches to tackle global problems with digital financial inclusion.

Our executive leadership is invested in the diversity of thought and inclusion. We strive to create an environment where employees and contractors are valued, empowered to support our business objectives and customers, and recognized for their individual and team contributions. We believe that building a truly inclusive culture is essential for all our leadership team, employees, and contractors to bring their authentic, whole selves to work and experience a sense of belonging and support. We achieve this by recruiting and retaining a diverse talent pool and increasing employee engagement through professional development and community outreach.

Our inclusive culture also extends to our customers or users.  We aspire to be a company where diversity of thought is embraced, and we recognize how this supports our promise to bring the best solutions and products to our customers who want to participate in the digital economy. We enjoy a workplace built on trust and respect, where we welcome expressive dialogue, distinct talent, and unique perspectives from individuals of various backgrounds.

We believe that individuals enhance our culture because of their identity or differences, such as socio-economic class, age, gender, ethnicity, education, location, or ability. We are committed to a nondiscriminatory approach, providing equal employment opportunities and advancement.

We’re applying to MIT SOLVE because we have a proven solution to one of the most pressing challenges of our times - to bridge a staggering $8.1 trillion MSME Financing Gap - but our App needs to be scaled to achieve a meaningful impact.

If selected, our team will significantly benefit from your nine-month program as well as access to grants, investments, and the MIT network. We will also seek inspiration and guidance from your support group of impact-focused leaders, mentors, coaches, and experts. Having the technical assistance from MIT SOLVE will help us scale our planned partnerships with other institutions, who can validate the impact of our solution and improve our business model.

We need financial support for additional software development, operations, marketing, training, and user support. Further software development will automatically convert bookkeeping entries into trial balances and financial statements (for MSMEs to share with lenders) and generate highly visualized business insights (to help MSMEs drive growth, profitability, and job creation). 

We will also need financial support to design and deploy digital marketing, user training, and user support. Fortunately, all of the above can be accomplished remotely through digital channels, helping us scale the solution at a reduced cost by collaborating and cost-sharing with local partners like NGOs, universities, advocacy organizations, etc., a model validated by our experience in Bangladesh.  

We gained experience working with a USAID-funded project in Bangladesh that supports smallholder farmers by creating market systems for mechanized agricultural services. We do this by improving access to affordable finance for MSMEs providing such services and passing on the benefits of affordable finance to smallholders in the form of reduced fees to rent mechanized services. In this context, we would like to explore a partnership with MIT D-Lab, which Appears to have been involved in a similar project since 2018 through a partnership with USAID’s Feed the Future Program (D2FTF). See:

https://d-lab-mit-edu.ezproxyberklee.flo.org/research...

We plan to expand our business model in Bangladesh by forming partnerships with other NGOs, universities, and advocacy organizations that share common interests. For example, our 18-month partnership with the Bangladesh Women Chamber of Commerce and Industry provided us with human-centered design ideas on the App’s UI/UX and training. Similarly, our budding partnerships with Bangladeshi universities will help us scale our solution by absorbing costs for user acquisition, training, support, and research, including monitoring, evaluation, and learning. University students will also benefit from learning accounting and financing through hands-on training and, in turn, support MSMEs in using the App.   

We will collaborate with local and regional offices of IFC and The World Bank by leveraging our Founder’s recent decade-long experience working as a senior advisor at these institutions, as well as his links to Harvard Business School (where our Founder received an MBA), Harvard Innovation Labs, HBS Digital Initiative, HBS Social Enterprise Initiative, and Harvard Alumni Entrepreneurs.  

Because our solution is aimed at advancing inclusion, digital literacy, and economic opportunity for millions of underserved and underbanked small businesses across the U.S. and globally, especially those led by women and, through them, improve the lives of millions more by creating jobs and entrepreneurial opportunities.  

We plan to extensively apply data science, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) to benefit humanity, particularly in achieving SDG 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, and 10 goals and to amplify their impact.

As explained elsewhere in this application, the aim of our primary intervention - through Book|Keeper, our digital inclusion app  - is to narrow the MSME Data Gap in order to bridge their Financing Gap and Performance Gap (as we defined them elsewhere in this application) so that MSMEs can create more jobs and income for the people in the base of the pyramid segments in low- and medium-income countries (our beneficiaries).

As we collect and organize more and more structured data on MSMEs’ operations and financials, we will need to deploy ML and AI to derive actionable insights to narrow the Performance Gap of our MSMEs (i.e., our customers) and on our beneficiaries in the base of the pyramid. ML and AI will also be crucial to derive insights on, and scale, MSME credit risk analysis by lenders and the capital markets. 

We plan to extensively apply data science, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) to benefit humanity, particularly in achieving SDG 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, and 10 goals and to amplify their impact.

As explained elsewhere in this application, the aim of our primary intervention - through Book|Keeper, our digital inclusion app  - is to narrow the MSME Data Gap in order to bridge their Financing Gap and Performance Gap (as we defined them elsewhere in this application) so that MSMEs can create more jobs and income for the people in the base of the pyramid segments in low- and medium-income countries (our beneficiaries).

As we collect and organize more and more structured data on MSMEs’ operations and financials, we will need to deploy ML and AI to derive actionable insights to narrow the Performance Gap of our MSMEs (i.e., our customers) and on our beneficiaries in the base of the pyramid. ML and AI will also be crucial to derive insights on, and scale, MSME credit risk analysis by lenders and the capital markets.