Bogota, Colombia – 30 April 2020: Movii, a leading mobile wallet and a challenger bank in Colombia, and Yabx, a leading technology company in contactless lending have joined hands to provide credit services for MSMEs. Businesses can use this credit service to facilitate their business operations and purchase FMCG stocks. This contactless service is introduced considering the COVID-19 pandemic situation in the country and will help businesses with pre-approved credit facilities to purchase their retail stock and cater to the needs of the general population amid lockdown. The partnership is being launched in Colombia with Procter & Gamble, a global consumer goods company whose wide range of product lines include Personal Care & Hygiene, Food & Beverages, etc. which are in high demand considering the current situation.
The service helps the merchant as they get credit in a completely digital manner without doing paperwork thus ensuring quick availability of money and removing the need of visiting bank facilities. P&G merchants in Colombia can pay for their stock orders using digital credit from their Movii wallet. These merchants’ credit limit will be derived using Yabx’s state-of-the-art credit decision analytics engine using advanced machine learning tools. The entire credit journey from onboarding of merchant, credit disbursal, and collections would be enabled using Yabx digital lending platform.
Speaking at the launch, Rajat Dayal, Founder & Chief Executive Officer of Yabx said, “Usually these merchants rely heavily on cash to purchase their stock. This comes with a lot of problems such as – lack of sufficient cash availability to optimize sales, security risks and inconvenience of handling cash, lack of liquidity management, continuous alienation from credit ecosystem, etc. These problems become even bigger and riskier at the time when the world is facing dreaded COVID-19 pandemic. Yabx aims to help these merchants to access easy and affordable credit and enable them to plan, manage, and grow their business more efficiently. Additionally, merchant network owners like P&G, who have a large merchant base in Colombia, can benefit from this program by enhancing their sales volumes, reduction in cash leakage, better planning and stocking as well as improved transparency in the supply chain. In Latin America, which is a special focus region for us, merchant financing is one of the key product to ensure effective management of COVID-19”
The Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Movii, Hernando Rubio said, “This move at the time of COVID-19 crisis is an important step towards our efforts to bring digital financial services to the underbanked population in Colombia of which MSMEs constitute a significant portion. We are planning to roll out this loan program to our larger merchant network and continue working on building partnerships with more CPG networks. In addition to this, soon we will be launching more credit use-cases for merchants including cash advances, POS loans, etc.”
One of the biggest problems facing MSMEs in developing markets today is the lack of access to credit for working capital, payables, equipment/asset purchase, etc. According to IFC, Colombian MSMEs face a financing gap of USD 56 Billion which is a major impediment to its economic growth potential. One of the primary reasons for this lack of credit access is that most of these MSMEs are still outside the financial institutional framework, primarily because the processes are too cumbersome and expensive for traditional banks. By innovating on alternate data for credit underwriting and managing loans end-to-end on a digital platform, Yabx is able to bring down the cost of service delivery significantly. Yabx aims to bridge this credit reach gap by partnering with large network players and bringing its global expertise to these developing markets.
About Movii
Movii is the first regulated Fintech in the country, a digital platform that operates under the model of Specialized Society in Electronic Payments (Sedpe). It is based on an application in which through a mobile phone, Colombians can have immediate access to an electronic account, a debit card without procedures or processes, to pay on the internet and shops, make free spins, pay any invoice, recharge minutes or data, among others. The merchant arm of Movii provides merchants with a suite of product lines including mobile recharge, digital content, bill payments, transportation service, P2P transfers, etc.
Since its launch, Movii has been witnessing rapid growth in its user base and transactions made. Movii has reached over 500,000 customers and over 50,000 merchants. The MasterCard debit card that was launched in March 2019 is seen and a strong driver for the company’s exponential growth. Hernando says “Our vision for the next 10 years is to make all Colombians part of the digital revolution and change their lives, with products that allow them to pay and be paid for free, handle and move their money, as simply as they handle today cash today.”
About Yabx
Yabx aims at simplifying financial access to over two billion unbanked customers and MSMEs in the emerging markets of Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and Latin America.
Yabx, through its partnerships with leading mobile operators, digital wallet providers, online payment gateways and PoS Aggregators enables Financial Service Providers (FSPs) to underwrite and service these new-to-credit segments using proprietary AI and ML algorithms on massive amounts of alternate data and helps them create a profitable portfolio.
Incubated by Comviva, a global leader in mobile financial services, Yabx is a part of the $21 billion Mahindra Group. Led by a team of industry experts and entrepreneurs, Yabx currently operates out of The Hague, New Delhi, Bogota, and Nairobi.
For further enquiries, please contact:
Sundeep Mehta
PR & Corporate Communications
Comviva Technologies Ltd.
Contact: +91- 124-481 9000
Email: pr@comviva.com
