Omnis Digital Platform (ODP)

Globally 1.4 billion adults do not have adequate access to financial services, like credit, insurance, or savings, thus limiting their opportunities for growth and development. The most vulnerable of these adults, typically women and informal workers, lack the required information to access formal financial products and services. When they approach a financial institution for a credit product, which they frequently do, they are regularly turned away because they lack the right information to qualify in their underwriting processes. Even Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) will reject a portion of these potential clients because they're lacking historical information to make a basic risk assement.  

Through our research, we've found that some of the key challenges in being able to access financial services  lie in not having formal identification or being able to reliably prove one’s identity. Another challenge with financial inclusion is that of information asymmetries. Marginalized consumers, including those in the lowest income stratas, and particularly women, micro and small entrepreneurs, informal workers and those living in rural communities, are often “information poor.” These segments lack information that traditional financial service providers (FSPs) look for, such as pay stubs, bank balances, sales accounting records, collateral etc. In spite of not having "formal" financial records, these consumers do have financial footprints (alternative financial data) that, if leveraged, would enable FSPs to offer more customized and tailored financial services to meet the demands of these specific segments. This financial footprint often demonstrate how much money they make in a month, how they spend it or how they invest it. Often this information is not easy to collect or verify, and few institutions aggregate this type of information because it's not cost effective or doesn't have any commercial value. In the absence of such information, FSPs continue to reject these clients as they are hard and costly to serve, or simply invisible. 

We've also found that traditional approaches to addressing access to financial services for the unbanked or marginalized women rely on subsidizing funding for FSP's that are willing to work with these underserved segments. These approaches are limiting as they continue to disregard key underlying and systemic challenges associated with the lack of traditional collateral and information.

Instead of asking for collateral in the form of property, or employment records, what if financial service providers looked at the information assets that these unbanked segments actually hold, and developed customized products based on these information trails?  Even the most marginalized segments have data trails - alternative information - that, if harnessed, could be used to provide them with the type of financial products and services that they require. 

At Omnis Finclusion Foundation (OFI), we are building digital tools that will enable the most marginalized communities to harness the power of their own information.

Omnis Digital Platform (ODP) enables unbanked/underbanked people to share, in a secure manner, their valid credentials and alternate financial history information with Financial Service Providers (FSPs). ODP initially provides two solutions, both require client consent: 

a) A remote identity authentication feature using biometrics allows FSPs as well as other institutions conducting client onboarding or KYC checks to reliably identify and authenticate the identity of individuals in the normal course of business operations 

b) A financial data aggregator solution allows individuals to record and show proof of alternative financial transactions, to be used when applying for financial services including loans. Our platform aggregates this non-traditional information that has not been tapped into hitherto, such as remittances received. Currently, this information is not systematically captured or shared with financial institutions when evaluating customers for credit or other types of products.

ODP connects with FSPs' core systems. We provide training to client facing officers within the FSPs so that they are able to communicate the value proposition of the solution clearly to their customers and to ensure that they are aware of their rights and responsibilities as it relates to their data. In addition, we leverage our website (www.omnisfi.org) and social media presence to communicate our impact. In a subsequent phase, we will develop and offer a B2C option, whereby customers can access and manage their digital information via web or mobile app. 

The first version of ODP was developed by a recognized local IT team in Honduras using the following technology:

1. Configuration of Firebase environment with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Cloud functions and App Engine.

2. Integration with Digital Persona SDK/API custom developed for web interface – Fingerprint Entry (Fingerprint Capture, encryption and Storage in cloud repository), comparison done in GCP App Engine in black box.

3. Backend development in Node.JS and Java.

4. Firestore DB, Cloud Storage and Cloud Hosting in Firebase.

5. Frontend development in VueJS with webpack and tailwinds

6. Financial grade encryption, public and private keys for each session to perform asymmetric encryption, symmetric encryption on top of that.

The ODP platform is currently accessed through the web with the following functionalities:

1. User Management

2. Identity Validation

3. Financial History (in an initial stage, collecting information via rest web services from FSP, easily scaled to other data sources)

5. Manual Record generation

6. Reports

We are currently deploying ODP in Honduras, where we have conducted extensive market research and developed strong stakeholder relationships. Our objective is to make ODP a digital public infrastructure that can be used across the Honduran market and eventually in Guatemala, El Salvador, Mexico and other regions (Africa and Asia). 

We believe our solution is innovative because a) no one currently offers a similar platform in our pilot market, using non-traditional data like remittances, b) we are also developing a Financial Inclusion Fund with a strategic partner to connect FSPs that use ODP with low-cost capital, c) there are no other non-profit digital infrastructure ecosystem builders like ours in the market.

Our target market is composed of all underbanked or unbanked individuals within our target geography(ies). We are currently focused on Honduras, with the intention of expanding to other Central American and similar markets (Guatemala, El Salvador, Mexico) over the next five years. In Honduras, only 14% of adults over 25 borrow from a financial institution (Findex 2017). 

We are starting our pilot with remittance data – roughly 1/6th of the population in Honduras or 1.5 million people receive a remittance of some sort, and remittance accounts for a 1/3rd of monthly income. Despite being a recurring and consistent source of income, remittances data is not consistently used currently in developing financial products and services. We estimate that roughly 50% of this remittance receiving population lacks sufficient access to financial services.   

More specifically, our target population are women and informal workers, that are information poor and have no means to collect and then share their financial histories with financial service providers (FSPs), especially remittances received, to facilitate access to loans to support small businesses and entrepreneurships. The main criteria to select our target population are:

• They fall in the lowest socio-economic strata, represented by low-income households or those employed in the informal sector, and are generally the most likely to migrate illegally to the US

• They frequently receive remittances from a relative, ideally at least once a month

• They have the potential or interest of investing in an entrepreneurship or small businesses

  Based on the previous estimates and definitions, we found that the Total Serviceable Market (TSM) in Honduras is approximately 856,667 individuals.  In the case of Guatemala, the TSM is 855,500 individuals; for El Salvador it is 575,000 indivuduals and for Mexico it is 5,550,000 individuals.  

  ODP will address the needs of our TSM by automating the inputs of basic data while these individuals interact with FSPs, which will reduce manual entries, potential errors and fraud, and provide real time information updates to enable more accurate risk assessment, compliance and decision making on granting financial products. 
  

  The benefit of addressing these needs for our target population will be providing them a digital platform which would be accessible to them and that gives them a secure manner in which to store, carry and control access to their own information, thus providing them greater agency and control of their own data, reducing the stress and need for carrying and submitting physical documentation, and most importantly being able to share information that was previously not readily available when applying for financial products and services.
  

We believe that we are the right team to design and develop this solution because even though we are a small team of 4 professionals, we are a high performing, multicultural team with over 100 years of combined experience in development institutions, finance, banking, payments, remittances and digital products. More importantly, we have vast experience working in the financial inclusion space in emerging markets and in the LATAM region under various capacities, mainly: a) the team's previous experience in Honduras and in the region while implementing the Kiva Protocol solution (now discontinued by KIVA), an open source digital ID platform based on blockchain technology, and b) serving the underbanked while working at the IFC, Banco Azteca, Tengo and Nacional Monte de Piedad, among other institutions.  

While working at Kiva previously, the co-founders tested initial mocks of the platform with personnel working in four different Honduran financial service providers. In addition, the team worked with a local research organization to understand the customer journey of applying for a new financial account/product with these FSPs, thus gaining insights into both FSP user and customer experiences, all of which have shaped the design of the current prototype. 

We continued designing this unique value proposition at Omnis through our non-profit structure, our holistic approach to financial inclusion in collaboration with ecosystem partners, combined with our team’s expertise in the subject matter and the region, and our platform’s singular focus on the underserved. Our organization and offering were designed based on extensive market intelligence and years of experience gained from operating in the region. While it is likely that private sector ventures to address a similar need are emerging, in our experience truly private ventures tend to gravitate to the higher end of the spectrum, often serving consumers that have already been served or banked in order to cross sell more products, and overlooking those that are financially underserved. Thus, we are combining our knowledge of the information sharing market, private sector experience serving the lower base of the pyramid and established partnerships with relevant local players to develop the right ecosystem to allow this venture to flourish. 

The team's experience shows seasoned professionals representing various minorities that understand the needs of the target population: a) Shalini Sankaranarayanan, CEO and co-founder of Omnis with 15+ years of experience working with the World Bank on developing credit information sharing platforms globally, b) David Suarez, CFO and co-founder of Omnis, with 30+ years of experience as a seasoned banking executive in Latin America, finance expert, business leader, independent board director and public official, c) Rodrigo Garcia, COO and co-founder of Omnis, an experienced business development professional with 20+ years of experience in implementation of innovative and inclusive technology projects in private and public sectors in Honduras, including Tengo’s digital e-wallet ecosystem, and d) Luis Felipe, Business Development, a former banking executive with 27+ years of experience in corporate/SME/consumer banking, digital innovation and transformation in Honduras and other Central American markets. 

We have conducted market research and tested early designs of our (mock) platform with real users (client service personnel of 2 microfinance institutions, one cooperative institution and one small bank) in Honduras. We have also signed an MOU with a leading microfinance institution in Honduras operating mainly in the San Pedro Sula and Choloma region, that understands the benefit of the digital platform for its clients and is willing to test the solution with us in our initial pilot, especially in the branches that pay out the highest amount of remittances. 

Currently we are iterating on our prototype (based on early market testing and research), connecting with the MFI's core systems to begin testing with this microfinance partner before the end of June of this year. 

Post testing and additional refinements, we plan to roll out the solution to additional branches of our microfinance partner and eventually to other similar financial institutions that serve customers in our target market.  

In addition, we have also signed an MOU with a leading bank in Honduras to establish a Financial Inclusion Fund (FIFund) that will channel low-cost capital to the microfinance lenders and other financial institutions that leverage our platform to identify and evaluate customers. The funding of this low cost capital could be provided by USAID through the program Creando Mi Futuro Aqui. 

Finally, it is worth mentioning that during our market research, we established contact with Honduras' central bank (Banco Centrale de Honduras - BCH), especially with officials in charge of advancing digital platforms and Fintechs.  We jointly discovered that BCH holds a significant database with at least two years of data on all remittances paid by the banking sector.  There was preliminary interest by these officials to connect with ODP and share this remittances information with the objective of broadening financial inclusion in the market.  BCH saw this as a possible beginning to an open finance platform in the country.     

Since we are currently in the prototype phase and in the process of connecting ODP with the core technology systems of our partner MFI, we are not serving any specific clients yet.  We estimate that we will begin serving 1,000 monthly remittance clients of our partner MFI by the second half of this year.   

As we mentioned, the desired outcome of uploading ID validation and financial histories to ODP is to provide access to financial products and services. Considering our desired outcome, in our pilot country, Honduras, over the first one-year period (June 2023-2024), we estimate that 850 micro and small entrepreneurs can benefit from a credit product offered through our partner microfinance institution(s). Of these, we estimate that 350 will be women youth entrepreneurs (ages 18 to 30), 330 will be male youth entrepreneurs and the rest will be non-youth entrepreneurs. The purpose of combining the data captured in ODP with the loans being funded by FIFund is to target as many women entrepreneurs.  

Over a five-year period, assuming we add the same number of entrepreneurs each year, we estimate that would impact a total of 4,250 entrepreneurs who would access a financial product through our partner institutions with the funding provided by FIFund using ODP data. The number of indirect beneficiaries is much higher as we estimate that each entrepreneur can benefit five additional individuals in their households. As micro and small enterprises (MSMEs) form the backbone of the economy, we expect that having adequate access to financial services will allow these MSMEs to stay operational, create employment, generate income stability and potentially reduce incentives to migrate (to the US).

It is important to clarify that these estimates are only for the beneficiaries that we can impact through ODP and FIFund.  If we consider the TSM of the countries that we are targeting over this 5 year period (Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Mexico), then we could be serving close to 8 million people with an estimated 3-4 queries of ID validation or financial histories per year per financial institution.  

As a start up non profit, we've found it challenging to raise enough interest on the benefits of our platform to promote greater financial inclusion.  There seems to be a significant amount of capital and funding for private sector solutions that focus on specific aspects of financial inclusion (such as biometric ID, financial literacy & education, digital payments & remittances, etc.) which are commercially viable. However, apart from government and development grants, there are scarce resources & capital being allocated to a holistic approach, such as ODP, for the base of the pyramid in low income countries.  

Since we are trying to deploy this idea quickly, and the process to access government or multilateral institutions' funding is slow and burdensome, and driven largely by political motivations, we decided to apply to Solve in order to expedite our go to market, raise awareness about the need to deploy high tech also through non profits and contribute to generating social value with innovative ideas.  

While we are initially developing our solution using existing technologies, we believe that in order to scale successfully, our platform will need to incorporate elements of AI/machine learning and big data analysis, as well as potentially explore blockchain applications for our solution. By applying to Solve, we would seek to expand our partner networks to include expertise in each of these areas.  

We would like to move fast in the implementation of our solution since the potential of remittances data for financial inclusion has been acknowledged by USAID/TMS, the International Finance Corporation, the IMF, & the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI).  The latest USAID “Digital Ecosystem Country Assessment (DECA)” report for Honduras acknowledges Omnis Finclusion as a key partner in supporting the design and implementation of an updated national financial inclusion strategy and to engage the private sector to enable last mile financial inclusion.  We have this momentum going and would like to take advantage of it.  

Our solution is innovative because it provides a holistic social value approach, and not only a commercially driven focus, to the multiple barriers to financial inclusion. We are solving the problem of lack of access to financial products and services from the origin, which is the lack of verifiable and trustworthy information to access basic financial products.  And we are integrating this solution into a full financial inclusion ecosystem that provides low cost capital and loans to the users of this alternate financial data.  

From our experience working in the Latin American region, we know that FSPs will only target clients with some verifiable data, and will serve them with high interest rate, short term maturity predatory loans. Instead of being a solution, obtaining this type of financing becomes a burden on the precarious financial standing of our target market, and since a high proportion of those loans are not paid, it ends up excluding them from other opportunities in the financial system because they are marked as delinquent. 

Our solution will catalyze a broader impact by providing this underserved population with real low cost alternatives to finance their productive projects or asset accumulation, such as setting up a business venture or building a house, which are two categories of interest for remittances recipients. Almost no financial or microfinance institutions go this deep down in the income pyramid, and when they do, they assume significant risks that are priced in the loans and makes them expensive.  These risks in underwriting a client can be mitigated with a solution like ODP.  

ODP can change the market by significantly increasing the numbers of people that can access financial products simply by making them more "visible" or "reachable". Every emerging country has a significant portion of its population with no or insufficient access to the formal financial system.  In most of these countries, the percentage can vary anywhere from 20-50% of the total population, and no public policy effort has been sufficient enough to date to reduce those numbers significantly.  This is why we believe that ODP has the potential to become a game changer in the financial inclusion space globally.    

Through our platform, we strive to address some of the key issues that inhibit Financial Service Providers (FSPs) from serving the unbanked and underbanked population segments. Our hypothesis is that by providing the right tools and information to these FSPs, they are able to make more informed decisions, lower their risk exposure and be more willing to serve these segments. As a result of increased access to financial products and services, we expect greater investments into local entrepreneurial efforts, micro and small businesses, job creation and economic opportunity that in turn would reduce incentives for target population segments to migrate and seek opportunities in other countries. 

While the Omnis Digital Platform addresses one part of the overall challenge in expanding financial access to the underserved, to effectuate any meaningful change, we are partnering with different stakeholders, and potentially working in a consortium. This includes partnerships with stakeholders that have specific skills in financial literacy and education, as well as public sector partners that can create the right enabling environment for the implementation and roll out of the platform at scale. We envision financial literacy and education efforts would focus on teaching the target population concepts on safeguarding their information, their data privacy rights and privileges, the benefits of sharing information, and importance of responsible borrower behavior. 

Some of the impact metrics that we would monitor over the course of implementing ODP include the FSPs using remittances and other alternative information to provide loans to financially underserved, the number of (women) individuals, micro and small entrepreneurs, and rural communities accessing financial services, (women-owned) micro and small businesses established, that stay in business and/or expand, unbanked (women) individuals financially educated by our partners, the increased economic opportunities, number of jobs created and reduced incentives to migrate as a result of greater financial inclusion. 

Through our initial pilot with partner MFIs, we expect to reach 850 entrepreneurs over the course of a year. If ODP is able to scale and sustain itself beyond the pilot, we could impact more than 4,000 entrepreneurs in Honduras alone over the next five years, but more significantly, close to 8 million remittances beneficiaries could start using their historical data in our target countries to access financial products and services. 

In our initial deployment phase, we will track the following key impact metrics for this program over a one-year period:

Number of MFIs using the ODP platform: 2

Number of branches using the platform: 6

Number of staff at each MFI using the platform: 12

Number of entrepreneurs that access financing through the MFI partner: 850

Over the long run, we have defined these broad impact goals for ODP:

• Increase in number of (women) individuals, micro and small entrepreneurs accessing financial services
• Number of (women-owned) micro and small businesses established, stay in business and/or expand
• Increase in FSPs using remittance information to provide loans to financially underserved
• Increase in economic opportunity and number of jobs created
• Number of unbanked (women) individuals financially educated by our partners 
• Number of causes of migration being addressed by OFI’s solutions
• Number of rural communities covered by OFI’s solutions  

Along with these goals, we will be defining specific baselines and KPIs on a yearly basis once the platform is operational in each target country.  

Omnis' theory of change model is the following:

We are using various types of Technologies, such as:

1. World Wide Web to access our platform

2. Biometric recognition devices and software for identity validation

3. Google Cloud based services to host our software and store data

4. Google Cloud security applications for cybersecurity  

5. APIs to connect to FSPs' core technology 

Omnis has developed a diversity, equity and inclusion policy which states that we are committed to encouraging equality, diversity and inclusion among our workforce, and eliminating unlawful discrimination so that our workforce is representative of all sections of society.  Each collaborator will be respected in a work environment that encourages collaboration, respect, tolerance and belonging. Our policy is extensive to collaborators, clients, suppliers and all stakeholders.     

In this respect, our team is diverse since inception.  It is led by a woman of Asian descent. The other three members are of Hispanic/Latin American descent, all three living in developing countries of middle to lower income levels. 

Additionally, our target population are marginalized individuals, especially women, in poor countries that have no access to financial products and are therefore excluded from having opportunities for development. By definition this target segment is largely comprised of women and they traditionally work in the informal segment, which can be up to 70% of total economic activity in many of these countries.  

Omnis is committed to continue being a diverse, equitable and inclusive organization through time. Our future hiring of team members will reflect this conviction, and all the products and solutions that we develop in the future will be designed with diversity and inclusion at their core inception.  

As an ecosystem player and a non-profit with a financial inclusion mandate, we have defined specific value propositions for different stakeholders:

Customer

• Data control

• Financial History

• Access to Financial Services

FSPs, MFIs & RSPs

• KYC & Compliance

• Access to Tech

• Risk Management

• Tap new market segments & clients

• Increase business volumes

Governments

• Jobs & income

• Competitive markets

• Financial Inclusion

Considering these value propostions, the key economic driver for our platform is scaling up users to increase the number of “queries” by FSPs in the platform, and then charge them for the use of the platform depending on their size and volume of queries. 

Since we are developing a solution to fill a void, we believe that it has to be reasonably priced to attract users to the platform, hence determining the correct price points will be critical. We are also thinking of reasonable incentives to support greater uptake of the system by rewarding providers of information to the system. 

Under this context, the primary revenue streams for our platform will be charging FSPs (or any other organization doing queries) for use of the platform, with different rates for queries related to ID validation or financial histories. The model contemplates that the rate per querie declines as the volumes of queries increases per user, but it also comtemplates different rates depending on the size and assets of the FSP using the platform.  

This revenue model is currently being designed and tested, so in the meantime our business is being funded by founders' contributions and grants. Over time, we expect to diversify our product offerings and develop additional revenue streams, such as fees from operating the Financial Inclusion Fund, fees charged for additional services using the Omnis Digital Platform, consulting fees, among others.

On the expense side, the primary costs for our solution are personnel costs (mainly operations), technology development costs through our technology vendor, fundraising and marketing costs. 

Initially, we are funding our work through founders' contributions.  The beta version of ODP, which has been finalized and is begining testing, was fully funded by Omnis' founders. 

The ODP team has also been actively seeking funding from donations and grants.  Omnis is currently being considered for some grants by non profit and development institutions, and is also in the process of securing funding by USAID and local banks in Honduras to begin operating the Financial Inclusion Fund (FIFund). We are targeting at least US$250,000 initially to deploy ODP and FIFund.  

Our financial projections have us depending mainly on contributions and grants for the first two years of operations.  As our revenue model begins gaining traction, the fees that we collect from queries to the platform and margins obtained from lending activity in FIFund will gradually take us to break even by the end of the third year of operations.      

1. Short term

Founders' contributions: US 17,500 dollars (Shalini Sankaranayanan, David Suarez and Rodrigo Garcia)

Expected Funding from DAI USAID Creando Tu Futuro for FIFund: US 250,000

Expected Funding from other donors: US 35,000

2. Medium Term (5 years)

Funding needs (IT & operational expenses): US 2 million per year

- Total funding from founders & grants: US 500,000

- Total operational revenues:  US 1,500,000