FYNIXSAVE

Globally, 1.7 billion adults are unbanked, despite the fact that two-thirds of them own a mobile phone that may allow them to access financial services. In Uganda, 89% or 16.5 million of the 18.6 million adult population is unbanked, while the country is home to approximately 1.4 million refugees.

We are striving to address the issue of a lack of a financial digital identity so that smallholder farmers and small business owners in rural and refugee areas can succeed in the digital economy. 

This is due to severe traditional banking criteria, a lack of collateral to secure a loan or credit history, lengthy distances to banking facilities, financial illiteracy, low productivity leading to minimal savings, high account operating fees, and high-interest rates. This has resulted in the establishment of informal community savings and loan groups, leaving people financially excluded with limited or no access to additional financial services such as banking, insurance, credit, and so on.

These communities operate on cash-based systems. This means without digital records, it becomes difficult for them to access credit, improve their livelihoods, and move towards financial inclusion. There is no financial literacy and they practice unsafe saving methods.

Fynixsave digitizes informal community savings and loan groups of smallholder farmers' access to technology(mobile application or USSD code).to manage and monitor their savings and loans.  In the process, we create a financial digital profile of smallholder farmers and rural communities and do credit scoring linking them with the marketplace, eCommerce services, and financial service providers like banks, insurance companies, and mobile network operators. Digitizing their financial records and farm produce.

We create a credit score model based on the data obtained in order to provide credit.
We provide an intuitive solution for automated reporting and real-time data analysis for organizations that assist the livelihood of these communities.

We work directly with non-government organizations, and 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.
We offer financial education to help people increase their financial literacy and stay engaged on the site.

Fynixsave’s main targets are the informal 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, and crop 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.

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

The Team leader has over 10 years of experience in building mobile and web software applications and a master's degree in Computer science majoring in data science and AI. He has worked with various NGOs, INGOs and financial institutions to extend financial services to financially excluded rural communities. He has experience in community mobilization, financial literacy, micro-finance, financial inclusion, and credit analysis.

The chief technology officer and co-founder is also a software engineer who works full-time with an undergraduate degree in computer science and 10 years of experience. Having worked with both local and international companies to develop various software products and services. 

The other 3 software engineers have 6 years of experience in building software and developing User Interfaces and User Experience designs that are based on human-centred design thinking. 

The Customer Success Manager has 6 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.

The whole team is on ground interacting with the beneficiaries on a daily basis to enable them be served appropriately.

Fynixsave solution currently serves 3000 beneficiaries, 2,400 of which are women and the rest men. All these beneficiaries their main source of income is farming. Therefore 3000 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. Also, FarmerConnect is a Swiss-based organisation doing traceability of food production and remuneration the smallholder using a QR code and sending the funds directly to the farmer.

By the end of 2023, we shall have 25,000 beneficiaries using our Fynixsave platform and our goal is by 2026 to have at least 700,000 beneficiaries. In the next 5 years by 2028, we target to have at least 1 million beneficiaries and to scale in 5 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.

In Uganda, alone we have over 20,000 informal community savings groups that account for over 10 million active saving groups with more than 200 million active members 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 beneficiaries are women who stay in the last mile rural communities and their source of income is smallholder farming.  

Being a Solver and a winner of the challenge will enable us to partner and work with organizations whose passion is to enable private sector initiatives to develop sustainable solutions for financially excluded communities.

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

We so far have digitized over 3000 beneficiaries. This opportunity would enable us to scale to more communities in Uganda targeting at least 20,000 beneficiaries by 2023. We will connect with 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 communities on which to benchmark their services in order to know if they can pay for them. These services are seedlings for smallholder farmers in order to increase their income by growing high-yield crops with a ready market for their produce.

Our solution is innovative because of the following;

Onboarding process: Our beneficiaries are taken through an approved financial literacy methodology in their local dialect 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, and 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 is used every weekly meeting to track and manage their savings and loan 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.

We are also now working towards integrating our system with the Ministry of Agriculture, Animal, Industry and Fisheries in order to have more farmers exporting and having their produce traced.

Machine Learning and Big data model: Our technology leverages machine learning and big data algorithms in order to organize and clean the data collected. This enables us to perform credit scoring of end-users who are recommended to various service providers who are interested in providing access to credit to these communities.

Our impact goals are defined as follows;

1. Partnerships: Our model is designed to develop partnerships with organizations that aim at improving the livelihoods of rural communities, especially smallholder farmers. Fynixwave enables these organizations to create a sustainable way of enabling these communities to come out of poverty and also have a digital financial identity that they can use to obtain other resources beyond their current limits or organizational constraints.
2. Integration: Our goal is to enable these excluded rural communities to have access to extra financial services that they had no access to before. We have been reached out to by various Micro Finance Institutions, NGOs and Mobile network operators to see how these groups can have special products to serve their needs.
3. Increased income and gender equality: Our goal is to see how these financially excluded communities can have increased income through better financing models that enable them to boost their sources of income. e.g Agricultural cooperatives that provide seedlings and enable farmers to produce more food. or Crop insurance so that the farmers don't totally lose out on their harvest because of a natural or climatic disaster. 
4. Traceability: We working towards having all farmer's produce that is exported or consumed traceable to the source. This will be possible by creating a digital trail that followed til the farmer. This will also enable the consumer to send a direct tip or bonus to the farmer whose profile you can access and thank them for the good work. We leveraging our partnership with organisations like FarmerConnect and the Ministry of Agriculture, Animal, Industry and Fisheries to create make this possible for Farmers in Uganda as we also scale to other 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 are also able to notice an increase or decline in their weekly savings and be able to understand what is affecting their source of income 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 avoiding price fluctuation due to low demand because of surplus or improved storage to avoid food wastage. Hence introducing partners to improve their post-harvest handling.

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 in these accounts. Having active group accounts. 

Quality Education: Through the financial literacy training program that we provide while onboarding the group we are able to calculate how many people have attended our training.

As we implement the technology, we can assess how many people have embraced its use by looking at how many are interacting with the Fynixsave system that we have brought to these communities.

The Theory of Change: 

1. The Barrier to Entry: The first layer of the objective is to lower the barrier of entry to use financial technology and biases of financial services. Introducing financial literacy that enables rural communities to first appreciate the importance of personal financial management, to value the importance of saving and investment, then debt management, and finally the benefits of various financial service providers like banks, insurance companies, mobile money, and Fynixsave.

• The Internet challenge: We provide an offline application that seeks data collected with the cloud when an Internet connection is provided. This can be even once a month. This eliminates the lag in using the application due to poor internet connectivity.
• Language barrier: We use local community-based translators to communicate with the locals, the application can also be customized to the language commonly understood within the region. 
• Digital literacy challenge: The person who usually operates the Fynisave mobile application is the secretary or group admin that usually literate and can read and write we train them on how to use the mobile application.

2. The Output: Each beneficiary of the saving group can digitally be profiled and have their financial digital records tracked in the mobile application. The secretary will input the shares bought by each member and they will receive an SMS upon submitting the weekly meeting details. The cumulative output is that we are able to measure the savings groups performance and study the patterns to improve the quality of the saving process and also the trust of the product to meet their financial needs of having a financial digital profile

3. The Outcome: Leveraging our Fynixsave Enterprise web dashboard, we can measure the savings and loan repayment rate and also provide better data analytics on each individual's financial performance. On the beneficiaries' end, the digital financial record means access to more financial opportunities like asset financing, and credit from institutions that have validated the credibility of our financial report. 

An informal community savings group must have at least 1 Smartphone to be used to record their weekly transactions. This works offline and syncs with an Internet connection to store the information on the cloud. The Smartphone should be running an Android Operating System. Members of the informal community savings groups don't need to have smartphones, they can access their account details via SMS using USSD which can be accessed on any type of phone. 

The informal community savings group app technology has four access points: (1)- The Fynixsave enterprise web dashboard app which is used for monitoring, and data visualization through analytics and insights from our data mining algorithms and reporting used by mainly partner organizations or group administrators. (2)- Savings group Fynixsave mobile app used by the group leaders to manage and monitor the group records and transactions, and the (3)- USSD which is used by the group members to check their savings balances, get mini statements, apply for loans and check their outstanding loan amounts on feature phones. (4) -For developers interested in integrating the savings platform can use our Fynixsave API.

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

We make an effort to create equal employment for everyone that meets the qualifications that have been put in place. We don't discriminate on race, sex, sexual orientation, colour, tribe, religion, disability, working age, national or non-national. Our Human resource policy has clear guidelines 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 last-mile rural communities to address their challenge of financial inclusion so that our solution is inclusive putting our end user at the centre of the solution we provide. 

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

Equity: Our policies and practices i.e. our human resource policy and sexual harassment policy are designed to provide an opportunity for every employee to feel comfortable being a part of the 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 for us to address their key challenges as we enable them to be financially included, this means getting them involved in the product development process.