Five African startups with solutions in the credit scoring space have been selected to pitch for the chance to secure a testing phase for their solutions with French utility company ENGIE.
Disrupt Africa reported earlier this month French multinational energy utility company ENGIE has been confirmed as Gold Sponsor of Africa Tech Summit Kigali, which takes place for the third time on February 4-6.
The partnership between ENGIE and Africa Tech Summit Kigali offered credit scoring startups with the potential to provide innovative solutions to both existing and future ENGIE customers the chance to pitch on the Africa Startup Summit stage, which is once again powered by Disrupt Africa.
ENGIE is looking for credit scoring solutions to provide proper, accurate, efficient and relevant business intelligence to improve and optimise the prospection and acquisition of future customers, financing schemes for its existing and future customers, and scenarios to valorise customer data that aim to design customer profiles and match offers to customer needs.
The five startups selected to pitch are as follows:
CARMA (Kenya): generation 2.0 of credit bureaus, built on a decentralised basis, CARMA facilitates data exchange directly between lending companies;
Emata (Uganda): the first digital agricultural bank in Africa, Emata provides farmers with affordable loans by utilising end-to-end digital processes, data-backed risk analytics, and a mobile-based distribution model;
Pezesha (Kenya): a holistic digital financial marketplace, Pezesha has built a proprietary credit scoring as a service infrastructure that provides a fully automated credit decisioning that is consistent, reliable and accurate for low income customers with no credit histories;
Plendify (Ghana): dedicated to lending working capital to businesses, Plendify uses an automated credit adjudication algorithm that is supported by machine learning and AI;
Superfluid Labs (Kenya): a data analytics firm, Superfluid delivers proprietary platforms for digital lending, credit scoring module development, business intelligence and consumer scoring platforms powered by data analytics and AI.
Prizes will depend on the maturity of the winning solution. For early-stage ideas, ENGIE is offering US$5,000 in cash funding to help to finance a prototype, or, for more developed solutions, it is offering a testing phase with ENGIE Africa. The winner of the challenge will be able to test the efficiency and viability of their solution in the relevant environment within the ENGIE Africa business framework over a period of six months.
Based on the results of the testing phase, the solution shall be integrated within the ENGIE Africa business portfolio for further co-development of the project. Prospective locations for the testing phase are South Africa, Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Ivory Coast, Morocco, Tanzania and Benin.
