CREO

520 million people globally make savings circles. These people use it as an interesting financing alternative to the loans made by a bank or informal lenders that impose risks even against the life and integrity of our target audience.
This savings is usually made in cash, which does not have any impact on the formal financial system, but is very helpful.
The logistics behind these circles fall into the hands of a leader who is in charge of gathering the people who will make it up, establishing the rules, collecting and subsequently recording each payment, and making the payment to the person who has the right to do so. turn to receive the collective savings. This is usually done on paper and these records, which are valuable because they reflect unmeasured payment behavior to date of millions of people, are completely lost.

We promote collaborative savings as an alternative form of financing without incurring debt or informal loans that endanger the integrity and life of our users.

We build an alternative score that works thanks to Artificial Intelligence. With this we want to provide the first opportunity to access the formal financial system and give a second chance to people who, for some reason, were expelled from this system. This is how we promote financial inclusion, diversify the sources of risk consultation and generate a culture of collaboration around communities that may or may not be in a vulnerable state, but in any case, people and communities have personal growth as a common goal. and achieving the goals of a dignified life. It is estimated that annually and globally, more than 520 million people save in this way, without obtaining any major benefit, reaching a savings figure close to 577 billion dollars.

Our solution will help people who are in situations of vulnerability and poverty, but recognizing that these benefits are also potentially scalable to an audience that has a minimum income, which is generally not enough to satisfy their basic needs for a dignified life. CREO's goal is to help overcome poverty from the base of the pyramid, working in community.

As CEO of Teclegal SAS, I have experience in implementing technologies focused on overcoming the gap in justice through our Redek platform. The work team is focused on the creation of high-impact projects, project management through agile methodologies, design, implementation and development of tools that help our users in a broad context and that are easy to use.
Our team is dynamic, open to new ideas and listening to users and constantly improving. Together, we bring together diverse experience in areas such as Law, Software Development, Design, (UX/UI), Artificial Intelligence, Process Automation, among others, in different Public entities in Colombia belonging to the national government and very high-quality Private companies.

We are currently carrying out recurring pilots with internal and external users of the company to carry out a launch open to the public. We do this with the aim of detecting errors and opportunities for substantial improvement for the user.

As a team we believe that Solve can help us overcome the various barriers we have. From the legal field, we would like to access the sandboxes offered by the Financial Superintendency of Colombia to test our solution in a safe environment and propose a regulatory framework that enables us to create savings circles with more than 19 people simultaneously for each circle. . We also believe that we would need to strengthen the growth of the team by incorporating profiles that Solve can help us connect. We have the best intentions and believe we have a great idea on our hands, and the talent willing to work on these initiatives with the little budget we have is too limited. We also do not have experience in scaling processes as massive as such a solution can be due to the size of the market and the number of available users, therefore, all monetary and non-monetary help will be of great value. In addition, we are in Solve to measure our idea and have feedback that helps us improve.

We consider the solution to be innovative because we not only offer registration and logistical support for the successful implementation of savings circles, but we also design and train an AI model to analyze behavioral data associated with in-app payment and compliance of CREO users. The score is being approved by the first financial companies with whom to reach alliances to approve our algorithm and allow our users to access credit. This algorithm was awarded at the AI Fund 2023 that took place in Medellín, Colombia, and we were recognized as the winning Pitch of the event. This, in turn, was built based on principles and frameworks of algorithmic justice to reduce biases and generate the benefit we want in the lives of our users.

Currently, the population that engages in savings circles to a greater extent is a population that is neglected due to several factors.
One of the main ones is that it is not a population that is attractive to most banks or entities that provide credit.
However, loan and credit levels, in countries like Colombia, have dropped drastically, among others due to the rise in interest rates. This created the need to find alternatives that allow us to attract the underserved public and with CREO, we are sure that we are going to impact millions of people in the region and globally, including or re-entering the population into safe and formal systems of access to credit.

To the extent that we manage to help in the placement of credits, we will remove users from lenders who charge interest that exceeds usury, and who put these people at risk when they do not pay.

This is a focus that generates violence and inequality, which negatively impacts people, and that instead of providing liquidity, locks them further into poverty.

CREO has the potential to solve all of this.

Our impact indicators are related to measuring savings, not only in the amount of savings related but also to the savings objective. This will help us acquire useful information to understand the context of our users. Of these, we plan to make inspiring stories visible that will help more people understand how to solve their basic or other needs thanks to the use of savings circles. Likewise, trace over time whether the savings objectives continue to be based on basic needs and perhaps which users advance to other types of needs. It will help us indicate the number of users whose objectives have changed and are focusing precisely on getting out of poverty.

We currently measure this, we have indicators related to the satisfaction of the savings circles and whether they are ultimately achieving their objectives. We also have indicators related to recurrence and recommendation or in this case, the use of the App by our users, the time spent or spent within the application and usability. We do this especially to improve usability and achieve more intuitive savings processes.

Our solution uses various technologies such as the following: Oauth2.0 authentication, SMS, Artificial Intelligence, point-to-point encryption, email for sending relevant information and user recovery and secure login. We also have a photo capture and image upload functionality for receiving payment receipts especially.

We comply with OWASP secure development policies.

In the future, technologies related to KYC will be implemented to comply with regulations related to the activity and others that help us achieve automations such as integrations through APIs with payment gateways, ACH, among others, for the automatic validation of transactions.

Full-time:

1. Nicolás Lozada (CEO)
2. Moisés Robles: Operations Manager
3. Shirlei Plaza: Administrative Manager
4. Jordan Rojas: Automation & Marketing
5. Daniel León: Developer
6. Jacobo Gómez: Head of AI
7. Federico Olsen: Legal Officer

Part-time

1. Diego Casas: Developer
2. Ana Salamanca : Intern
3. Johan Vargas: Intern
4. Sofía Gómez Aguirre: Sociologist

The majority of the team and organization has been working on this project for 18 months.

At CREO we have a completely diverse team.

From the moment we began to formulate the project we have guided it through principles and values, which are specific to the company.
Although our team is not part of the vulnerable population, we have come to listen to them. We carried out field work in various areas of the city where, from the CEO to the intern, had the opportunity to interview more than 1000 people one by one, learn about their needs, and how they have used the savings circles. The target audience was always diverse, that is why we always went to different areas of Bogotá.
Everywhere, we were received kindly, and we gave all our humanity in every interaction with the public.
From this field work, a fairly detailed report emerged on the interviewed public and helped us build what is today CREO, an inclusive application from start to finish.

Our business model is focused on the collection and analysis of data to feed and correct performance of the scoring algorithm. The score will be monetized, facilitating people's access to credit, achieving a percentage close to 5% for every thousand credits placed by the Application.
This will take time as we need to consolidate good savings habits in the community, with which we hope to monetize during the second year of operation open to the public.
Also, we are aware that we can show advertising to offset operating costs but initially but this will not be done. Initially, all our users will be able to save without limit (except legal limits), benefiting from the scoring algorithm and over time receiving access to financial coaching through a chatbot that has also been built by us.
In the future, we hope to have authorization in Colombia so that our users can make their payments through our platform directly.

We are currently minimizing unnecessary expenses as much as possible and are focusing on strengthening the product and achieving organic reach to the first 1,000 users during the first year of operation.

To the extent that we validate the monetization model, we will make modifications or maintain it to ensure the operation and achievement of the business over time.
Our technologies used also make the most of the available resources, which means we do not incur unnecessary costs in cloud infrastructure.
Also, we have analyzed from a legal perspective the way to operate that does not generate unnecessary tax obligations or additional responsibilities that put at risk the little financing we have, which is direct from our CEO and the income generated with our Redek platform.