Ewarren inclusive financial solution

Access to small changes and an inclusive mobility service for urban riders in their daily commutes and the financial inclusion of the drivers who operate in the informal sector remain a challenge in emerging countries.  

From our fare collection system for informal public transport network, drivers can accept digital payment from commuters using our NFC prepaid debit card & QR code while recording his revenues. Thanks to our platform, commuters benefit from mobility services during their journey. Ewarren aims to partner with financial institutions to provide financial inclusion solution and the local governments to provide a social safety net to the drivers that are members of its network.

The driven data provided by our platform will allow easier access to life insurance, social security benefits, and microloans. That will positively change lives if it is scaled regionally.

In the context of WURI challenge, we would use our data to propose a clear social insurance implementation scheme for the informal sector in general and more particularly for the informal public transport sector. Implementing of the social protection for the informal transport operators would require a platform that will capture the earning of the stakeholder. Our innovation can capture this information and provide it to the national social agency. Our innovation can be scaled in any other informal sector and the same concept can be applied to all these communities (record revenue and proposed a payment scheme).

 About 100,000 people are working in public transport, and assuming each person is taking care of an average of 5 people, we can presumably say any issue from this sector affected about 500 000 people  in the town of Abidjan. 

The factors contributing to the problem relate to our solution included the clear understanding of the problem, the skills/competence of our team and the resources available. Before launching our product, we have made a survey to clearly understanding the problem and then designed our product and business model accordingly. Our team is composed of experienced people with appropriate skills.

Our solution will serve the informal sector workers in general and, more particularly, informal public transport operators. The drivers, apprentices from collective taxis and minibuses, and traditional ferries workers are first beneficiaries of our solution.We also cover informal public transport entrepreneurs as they face the same issue in terms of social insurance. 

Our solution has been designed based on our survey back to 2015.During this survey, drivers and entrepreneurs clearly explained their need in terms of the financial products and the social insurance coverage. With this information in mind, we have designed our fare collection by taking into consideration these needs, and this is why we are able today to provide more data and tools to implement a proper and relevant social contribution scheme as well data for banks to inform credit decision. Based on that we believe our solution addresses their needs.

The WURI challenge is seeking an innovation that proposes a clear approach on how the social insurance payment scheme can be designed for informal workforce. By designing our fare collection along with a wallet, the informal worker revenue can be tracked. As the revenue is the baseline of the determination of the contribution, we believe our solution is aligned to the WURI challenge. Also, our target population are the informal public transport operators ( both drivers and entrepreneurs)  and therefore we are well aligned to both the challenge and our selected dimension.

Our main competitors, namely Moja Ride and Soutrali. We might have similar technologies product on the market as our competitors and more specifically as MojaRide. However, what make our innovation bold than the competitions is how we implement the solution on the market and the added value services. In patterning with local banks , we will offer starting on October micro loan on demand as well many insurance products for drivers and commuters, As stated above , we are in advance talk with social agency to implement the first contribution scheme for the informal worker. All these products can be consulted from our apps as well by USSD code.

Our technology allows users (drivers and merchant) accept contactless payments with just their phones, without the need for any external hardware. It incorporates both NFC payment and dynamic QR code payment technologies.

The customer can make payment using both his NFC Card and or the QR Code embedded in our customer apps. The identification of the customer is their phone number along with a 5-digits password. The customer can load it wallet account at our agent location and or reload it using the three wallet existing on the market (orange .MTN and Moov).

The driver as well the merchants get an app that they can install in any android telephone device and make their telephone as a payment device. We have designed in such way to reduce the hardware cost to our merchants and drivers to adopt massively our product.

Our mobility platform is under development and we will be released the first version on the last quarter 2020.

The informal workforce is highly exposed and vulnerable to a range of risks – in terms of employment, remuneration and contracts, employment difficulties, long-term income and job security. The introduction of social, even simple, for the artisanal workforce can change behaviors. This project wishes to address this. Our aim is to allow informal workforce to obtain a social insurance and basic financial product through data provided by our platform.

The challenge to implement even a simple social assurance for the informal workforce is only due to the lack of reliable information to measure their revenue as these are the baseline for any social agency to propose a clear scheme of the social contribution. Therefore, the key outcomes for this project are to collect mindful information and facilitate the collect of such data to provide to the social agency to implement the social insurance. Other outcomes are then included to provide basic financial products such as saving, loan, pension plan and retirement plan.

The project involves the following activities: i) Gather information from the platform, ii) open a bank account for each subscriber, iii) propose to the social agency our data to propose a simple social insurance program.

The project’s Theory of Change argues that the activities will collect data to propose a clear scheme of the social contribution implementation for informal workforce.

The project’s Theory of Change argues that implementing a such ambitious program for the informal workforce will lead to the change of the behavior for this category of people. 

The platform is based distributed computing architecture pattern. Each microservice is an independent API service that can integrated to any platform that support the restful API architecture. Based on this , we can provide an API or accept API from national social agency to provide information such a revenue and other required data to implement the social insurance program for the informal workforce that are part of our customer base. The collection on the social contribution should be determined on daily basis or on demand, all depending on the requirement from National agency. 

Ewarren driver app is very ease to use as we have designed it taking into consideration the level of education of the users. Drivers must tap the payment on the app and the customer has to pay from its dynamic QR code or his NFC card.

Digitalisation is the biggest trend in Africa and our platform is bringing multiple innovations with new APIs use cases and payment solutions. The platform is based distributed computing architecture pattern. Each microservice is an independent API service that can integrated to any platform that support the restful API architecture  

The Ewarren payment platform USSD payment systems and the queue messaging system allows us to handle transaction asynchronous. Our solution supports a callback service to reconnect and update pending transactions.

Currently our solution is used by about 700 drivers on two commuter lines and 100 workers from traditional ferries on the lagoon in Abidjan capital city of Cote d’Ivoire . We have also enrolled more than 6 ,000 customers who use on daily basis our payment engine to pay their fare. 

For the next year, we are looking to onboard an additional 3 000 drivers , another 200 workers from traditional ferries and an addition of 50,000 customers.

For the next five years, we will onboard about 50,000 drivers , 1,000 workers from traditional ferries and 350 000 customers.

Our vision is to create a smart mobility solution while empowering a cashless payment solution for all type of merchant working, particularly in the informal sector. Our smart mobility solution would integrate informal transport network to formal transport network creating, the first hybrid transport network. By doing this , we will serve about 3 million people on daily basis in the sole town of Abidjan. Through our dedicated partnership program, we will replicate the same model in  other countries in the west Africa countries where we will leverage on the experience gained in Cote d'Ivoire. As we are working now with one of the largest regional bank network ( Ecobank and UBA) , we will be able to quickly replicate the same model in the other countries.

By digitizing the merchant payment, our vision is to create the first merchant scoring platform and make it available for all financial institutions to facilitate the credit decision.

The only barriers we are facing off now is the funding.

The funding is our barriers now.

none

We are 41 people working full time on the project.

Our first differentiation from our competition is our dream team. Beside of our CEO, we have gathered reputable people on our advisory board. We have experts in mobility and digital banking with over 25 years’ experience in mobility and transport industry. Both their expertise and know-how will enable us to implement a unique strategy, being our main competitive advantage.

We have signed partnership with the following organisation :

Banks : Ecobank, UBA and Mansa bank. We are working with bank to be compliant with the regulation and more specifically to improve financial inclusion for people working in informal sectors.

Telecom: Orange , MTN and Moov : We are working with them to allow our final customer to reload their wallet from the telecom existing wallet on the market. This reduce our agent force throughout the town and increase our financial viability.

VISA : We are working with visa to allow visa card to be accepted in our network. We are launching our first integration with VISA at the end of September. This is Visa and Master card dynamic QR code merchant payment.

Municipality : We are working with municipality to reorganize the informal public transport network in order to enhance the mobility service within the municipality.

National social agency: We are in advance discussion with this agency to introduce the social insurance for the informal transport workforce,

Informal drivers and operators Unions : We are working with this union to facilitate the adoption of our solution with the drivers member of the union.

Through our approach, we wanted to provide to the small business working in informal sector an affordable financial product that suit to their need. To reach this goal, we propose an affordable business management tool in which we will embed a digital payment engine to improve customer payment. Our value proposition is to allow the se small business to access to the loan from our bank partner based on their data provided by the business management tool (Point of sale solution and fare collection system). For the payment service, the small merchants will not pay anything while for the business management tools, we will set a service price to them to continue receiving the update and upgrade of the software. That software will be working without internet.

We are providing these services because of our survey from the small merchants including the drivers from informal transport network. The small merchants will be using our solution because we are solving their important pain point. This pain point is the working capital funding that is not possible as there is no record of their revenue.

Our financial sustainability is based on our revenue . Our business is profitable at certain level of the volume of transaction. However from now to the break even point , we are funding our business based on the grant and the personal fund from founders.

Bill and Melinda Gates foundation = 100 000 ( 2015) USD 

Roddenberry foundation              =     15 000 ( 2017) USD 

Revenue for the last 12 month      =     10 000 USD 

At this stage , we are looking for 250 000 USD to scale our business in the entire town of Abidjan. We will use all the funding source ( equity, debt or grant ).

Total expenses budget is about 150,000 USD .

I am applying to this challenge for two main reasons :

1- Visibility for my solution and start up 

2- Funding purpose .

I need board member to benefit from their experience in business and help building a strong business . I need funding to scale my solution.

Google .

I wanted to partner with google in order to get their help in my mobility solution as I wanted to create a map from google maps to custom for our need.