FYNIXWAVE LIMITED

Globally, 1.7 billion adults remain unbanked, yet two-thirds of them own a mobile phone that could help them access financial services. In Uganda, 89% or 16.5 million of the 18.6 million adult population of Uganda remain unbanked and host over 1.4 million refugees.

Fynixwave provides fynixsave a free digital financial identity application to support informal community-saving groups of refugees, whose majority members are women and youth to manage and monitor their savings and loans. In the process, we create a digital profile of these refugees, do credit scoring, and link them to financial service providers like banks, insurance companies, and mobile network operators. Currently, we support 30 community refugee saving groups with over 450 beneficiaries in Kiryandongo refugee settlement to obtain a digital financial identity and access extra financial services from financial service providers like banks that they couldn’t access before.

We are working to solve the challenge of lack of a financial digital identity to allow people in rural and refugee communities who are smallholder farmers or small business owners to thrive in the digital economy. According to the financial sector deepening in 2018, in Uganda, 89% or 16.5 million of the 18.6 million adult population of Uganda remains unbanked. Globally 1.7 billion adults remain unbanked.

This is as a result of stringent traditional banking conditions, lack of collateral to obtain a loan, or credit history, long distances to the banking facilities, financial illiteracy, low productivity leading to low savings, high costs of account operations, and high interest rates. This has led to the formation of informal community savings and loan groups which leave the adults financially excluded having limited or no access to extra financial services like banking, insurance, credit and so much more.

Fynixsave digitizes informal community savings and loan groups of smallholder farmers and refugees to manage and monitor their savings and loans.  In the process, we create a financial digital profile of refugee and rural communities and do credit scoring linking them with the marketplace, eCommerce services, financial service providers like banks, insurance companies, and mobile network operators. An android fynixsave mobile application is used in each community savings and loan group which on average has 30 beneficiaries. 

We work directly with non-government organizations, agricultural cooperatives in order to support these savings groups to be onboarded on the platform. These organizations use the Fynixsave enterprise dashboard to track the individuals they are supporting with agricultural products, agricultural loans, and much more. Refugees and smallholder farmers can also access a financial statement from the platform which now creates a formal financial identity. Our platform is free to the community savings and loan groups.

Currently, we have digitized 30 community savings and loan groups in the Kiryandongo refugee settlement with 900 beneficiaries majority of these are women. Save the children international and Dutch Relief Alliance funded digitize 30 saving groups. Having a digital financial identity has made it possible for community savings and loan members to tap into financial services they wouldn’t have access to on their own.

Fynixsave’s main targets are the informal refugee and rural community savings and loan groups that are financially excluded. The majority of the individuals in these groups are women and youth who are smallholder farmers. We empower each saving and loan group by providing them with financial literacy training and digital tools to tap into extra financial services and increase their access to various sources of income. We transform an informal community savings and loans group into a formal and recognized group in the community. This transformation enables the now formal groups to apply for loans, credit, insurance from financial service providers like banks, credit bureaus, and insurance companies based on the credit history of these groups and their individual members. The once insignificant community savings and loans groups are now powerful and important in their community.

Fynixwave digitizes informal refugee and rural community savings and loan groups that are financially excluded to manage and monitor their savings and loans. In the process, we create a financial digital profile of refugee and rural communities and do credit scoring linking them with the marketplace, eCommerce services, financial service providers like banks, insurance companies, and mobile network operators.

That’s why our solution directly aligns with the challenge of digital inclusion because we are a technology-based solution that ensures everyone has access to the digital economy.

This stage of development we selected is accurate because we have done a pilot by partnering with Save the Children International in 2019 to digitize 15 informal community savings groups with 450 beneficiaries in Kiryandongo Refugee Settlement under their Livelihoods program. This was a success and we were able to enable 13 of these saving groups to go ahead and open up a bank account in Post Bank a nearby financial institution. These are refugees who didn't have trust in the financial institutions before met them but after training them in financial literacy and providing a digital application they began to appreciate the use of a digital platform to digitize their savings and loans. In 2021 we are digitizing 10 saving groups a total of 300 beneficiaries in Kiryandongo refugee settlements with support from the Dutch Relief Alliance and 5 refugee saving groups totaling 320 beneficiaries in Kampala. 

Our solution is innovative because of the following;

Onboarding process: Our beneficiaries are taken through an approved financial literacy methodology in their local language provided by the Bank of Uganda as an onboarding process before we introduce the digital technology.

Digital Process:  We enable the last-mile informal community-saving groups that were initially excluded in refugee settlements , rural smallholder farmers, pre-urban populations to have a digital financial identity. This is achieved through the Fynixsave mobile application that digitizes the individuals in each informal saving group and creates a digital profile and a financial record showing their savings, loans, and source of income. This application enables the groups to have a digital ledger that used every weekly meeting to track and manage their savings and loans process.

Integration: We then enable these excluded individuals and community-saving groups to access extra financial services which previously were not in their reach. Our system is integrated with banks, microfinance institutions, mobile network operators, and insurance companies that can now easily provide their services to much more organized well-profiled communities.

Machine Learning and Big data model: Our technology leverages machine learning and big data algorithms in order to organize and clean data collected. This enables us to perform credit scoring of end-users who are recommended to various service providers who are interested in providing credit or financing models like solar or clean energy products. One of the clients is Cloud Green that's providing electronic bikes to refugees to transport their agro produce to the market.

Fynixsave solution currently serves 900 beneficiaries, 750 of these are based in Kiryandongo refugee settlement and the rest are in the surrounding host communities. Within 3 months we had digitized 450 beneficiaries beginning of this year. Therefore 900 beneficiaries currently have a digital profile showing their savings and loans. An individual member can now access a mini statement via SMS or print a full financial statement via the Fynixsave Web Dashboard.

We currently have an exclusive partnership with CloudGreen that is improving access to markets through value addition and we provide financial literacy and digitization of the women saving groups they support. Women vendors on our platform will automatically have a percentage of their profits saved via their Fynixsave account.

By end of 2021, we shall have 3,000 beneficiaries using our Fynixsave platform and our goal is by 2023 to have at least 60,000 beneficiaries. In the next 5 years by 2025, we target to have at least 500,000 beneficiaries and to scale in 2 East African countries.

Increased Income and Gender Equality:

We measure this by monitoring through the Fynixsave Enterprise web dashboard how many women vs men are using our platform. This enables to reach out to more women savings groups and encourage them through training to adopt using of technology to manage and monitor their savings and loans. They are trained on the benefits of having a digital financial identity. We also able to notice an increase or decline in their weekly savings and be able to understand what is affecting their source of income and the majority are smallholder farmers so you can easily identify the challenge with the market and provide mitigating solutions. Some of these can be as easy as access to extra markets and avoid price fluctuation due to low demand because of surplus or improved storage to avoid food wastage. Hence introducing partners like solar drying.

We are able to measure the amount of food produced dried using a solar dryer which we have recommended through a partner.

Integration and access to extra financial services:

This is measured by how many informal saving groups have decided to go ahead and open up a bank account and are depositing their money on these accounts. Having active group accounts. 

1. CEO/project manager, 1 person full-time
2. Software Engineers, 4 people work full-time
3. Customer Success Manager, 1 person full-time
4. Field officers, 2 part-time

We have a lean team with vast experience in product development and community engagement. 

The CEO is also the project manager with 8 years of experience in building mobile and web software applications. He has an undergraduate degree in Computer science. He has worked with various organizations like UNFPA to introduce Health digital innovations to rural communities. The CEO has experience in starting and scaling startups. 

The chief technology officer is also a software engineer who works full-time with an undergraduate degree in computer science and 6 years of experience. Having worked with both local and international companies to develop various software products and services. 

The other 3 software engineers have 4 years of experience in building software and developing User Interfaces and User Experience designs that are based on human-centered design thinking. 

The Customer Success Manager has 3 yrs of experience enabling startups to sell and engage with customers and end-users in rural and pre-urban communities. Having worked with CTI Africa to sell their healthcare products.

The 2 field officers with 5 years of experience are based in the community and they provide onboarding financial literacy training. They are certified by the Bank of Uganda to provide financial literacy training to rural and pre-urban communities in simplified ways that are easy for the communities to understand.

Our approach towards a diverse, equitable, and inclusive leadership team is through identifying and creating policies and practices.

We make it an effort to create equal employment for everyone that meets qualifications that have been put in place. We don't discriminate on race, sex, sexual orientation, color, tribe, religion, disability, working-age, national or non-national. Our Human resource policy has a clear guideline on advertising for employment till hiring.

As an innovative company one of our core values is human-centered design which enables us to engage with our stakeholders intensively to solve their challenges. We work directly with refugees to address their challenge of financial inclusion so that our solution is inculsive putting our enduser at center of the solution we provide. Our standards are based the Core Humanitarian Standards which we adhere to through partnership with Humanitarian organisation that we work with like Save the Children International.

Diversity: Everyone at Fynixwave is heard and their views are considered important to providing an efficient solution to the problem we solving.

Equity: Our policies and practices i.e our human resource policy and sexual harrasement policy are designed to provide an opportunity to every employee to feel comfortable being a part of Fynixwave team.

Inclusion: At Fynixwave we design solutions to serve the un or underbanked communities who are the excluded from global market. Therefore it's important to us to address their key challenges as we enable them be financial included, this means getting them involved in the product development process.

In Uganda, alone we have over 20,000 informal community savings groups that account for over 600,000 beneficiaries who are willing to access extra financial services if they can have a digital financial identity to clearly define their financial history. The majority of these communities are either in rural communities, refugee settlements, or peri-urban regions. Uganda is one of the largest refugee-hosting nations in the world, with over 1,400,000 refugees. 

Being a Solver and a winner of the challenge will enable us to partner and work with organizations like Andan Foundation whose passion is to enable private sector initiatives to develop sustainable solutions for families forced to flee their homes due to war, internal conflict, and climate change.

The program would help us improve our AI-powered tech platform that is designed to build a clear credit history of these individuals.

We so far have digitized over 900 beneficiaries. This opportunity would enable us to scale to more refugee settlements in Uganda targeting at least 60,000 beneficiaries by 2023. We will connect these refugees communities to various financial service providers like banks, microfinance, insurance companies, non-government organizations(NGOs), and international government organizations(INGOs) some of which have already approached us interested in supporting these communities but don't have access to clear credit history of the refugees on which to benchmark their services in order to know if they can pay for them. These services include pay-as-you-go clean energy products (like solar, cookstoves, or electronic bikes), credit, crop insurance and so much more.

We currently have a good software development team specialized in building a robust application that is scalable. Our current need is to increase our financial capital and revenue by partnering with organizations that understand the cost involved to acquire financially excluded clients especially in rural communities and refugee settlements.

Clear collecting of data, measuring and showing the extent of our impact on the livelihoods of these communities would enable us to share informative reports that market our social enterprise better.

Our biggest customers are non-governmental organizations and international non-governmental organizations. We need to directly communicate with them and share the impact of our solution in the humanitarian areas in order to scale our solution through their network.

To boost our data analysis and algorithms we would appreciate the support to monetize and utilize the data points we collect with our product. We know that this data might unlock potential sustainable new ways of supporting rural, refugee, and peri-urban communities that were previously financially excluded.

We are interested in partnering with the Andan Foundation, the foundation can enable us to finance the scale of our solution in the various refugee settlements in Uganda but also in other refugee communities where they promote financial inclusion.

We can also leverage their network and have our solution recommended as the number 1 go-to solution to manage and monitor village savings and loan groups or informal community savings groups.

MIT faculty would also be ideal to further our data analytics and machine learning technology to be able to have better credit scoring metrics that meet the required standards.

Our product directly promotes refugee resilience, self-reliance, and integration through financial inclusion. We have over 900 beneficiaries who are refugees in Kiryandongo Refugee Settlement towards northern Uganda. This settlement hosts South Sudanese refugees, some from Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Ugandans that were resettled there from Bududa - Kasese region after the natural disaster of landslides.

The Andan Prize for Innovation would enable us to scale from 900 Beneficiaries to at least 4,000 refugee beneficiaries using our solution with an indirect impact of up to 20,000 refugees. This is possible because when we enable an individual in refugee settlement to obtain a digital financial identity and have a transparent and secure savings and loans process in the community savings group this builds more trust in the savings group and hence increased savings. Also, more individuals are now interested in being a part of a formally organized savings and loans group. This also makes other private sector organizations pick more interest to support these marginalized communities since now they have insights on the financial stand of these people. The average household in a refugee setting has 5 family members which means if one of them can access these extra financial benefits of being a part of a formal digital savings groups then all the 5 members will be impacted indirectly.

According to the Global Findex World Bank report 2014, out of the 350 million people that are unbanked in sub-Saharan Africa the gender gap reaches 9 percentage points between women and men. Globally the unbanked /financially excluded are the poor and the majority are women.

Formalizing savings practices offers another avenue to financial inclusion. In developing economies, 160 million unbanked adults save “semiformally,” through an informal savings club or a person outside the family. In Sub-Saharan Africa, moving these savings into accounts could increase account penetration from 34 percent to up to 47 percent and add up to 70 million adults to the ranks of the banked—including about 40 million women. 

The innovation for women's prizes will enable us to see more women that save through community informal savings groups access a digital platform through a free mobile application to digitize their records and get connected to extra financial services same as those they would access if they had a bank account.

We use data analytics and machine learning to perform credit scoring based on the data points we collect while tracking and monitoring individual's performance in the savings and loan groups.  My team will use this prize to improve the credit scoring algorithm and do more research and development on how to utilize these data points to improve the livelihoods of these financially excluded communities. 

We shall also use the prize to invest in identifying ways of monetizing the data organized and analyzed to interested businesses that want to access this target market.

We shall invest the prize to acquire the legal data protection and privacy licenses that would make our data authentic and reliable for use by other interested organizations.

We use a digital innovative and sustainable approach to enable financial inclusion of the financially excluded communities. 

Through our approach, we are able to have digital inclusion even to the last mile communities that were being left out. We in the process provide digital literacy training as part of the onboarding process on how to use the Fynixsave application on the smartphone.

The GSR Prize will enable us to scale our product to more beneficiaries. With the support of skilled personnel from GSR, we can also move our solution to blockchain and create a token that can be accessed using these savings and loan groups.