FarmInfinity

Farmers of India, primarily small and marginal farmers, do not have access to financial services like cash credit, insurances, loans etc., as Banks/NBFCs view them as small ticket customers.

Also, banks/NBFCs do not have any credit model to determine financial capability of a farmer, thus they are risk averse to provide loan/insurance, etc. to a farmer.

Farmers also do not know their economic worth, as their income is irregular, and they do not have basic documents like PAN, Land patta, etc. to prove their financial worthiness.

Finally, the semi-literate farmers get intimidated by the cumbersome paperwork required by banks for availing any loan or insurance, thus they skip the formal route, and take money from Loan Sharks at a very high premium (upto 10% per month), thereby falling into the debt trap. At extreme cases, the farmers lose the farmland and might be forced to commit suicide.

We have created Farm Infinity (farm∞) is a digital platform facilitating easy access to affordable financial services for smallholder farmers and agribusinesses worldwide. Our patented technology enables financial institutions to reduce their risk (NPAs) and helps them make better decisions to provide quality services to their rural customers.

We determine farmers' creditworthiness by evaluating over 80 individual parameters, 600 data sets, and over 10Mn data from Govt. Database. We help banks and insurance companies reduce their cost of operation by 5 times and reduce the time of processing an application by over 6 times.

Our solution includes easy to use multi-lingual Android mobile app. for the farming community and browser based digital dashboard for the financial institutions to evaluate each application with ease. Our proprietary algorithm is a ML based solution for credit assessement.

Our solution is for the smallholder farmers of the world.

Our solution provides an easy access to affordable financial services like loan and insurances for the marginal farmers.

We have two segment of customers:

Segment A – Banks/MFIs/NBFCs & Insurance companies whom we can provide our Scorecard & Credit worthiness report of farmers, based on our algorithm. These segment of customer will be paying for the scorecard as OTF (one-time-fee) and uptake subscription for our BaaS (Banking as a Service) platform, which will showcase the progress of the life-cycle of the loan/insurance product issued by them to our on-boarded farmers.

Segment B – Farmer Companies/Agribusiness/individual farmers will be our another segment of customers who will utilise our Digital Platform to on-board their associated farmers to access loan/insurance products through our platform. Most of the basic services will be under Freemium for this segment, unless the Farmer Company/Agribusiness requires additional services like Geo-tagging, Soil reports, RFID for livestock insurances, etc. which will be under chargeable basis, as per market rate.

Team Lead, Gunajit Brahma, has been working with the smallholder farmer community (mostly indigenous tribal farmer) since 2012, in the Northeastern parts of India. He has been instrumental in benefiting over 10,000 farmers (under various farmer collectives like FPOs/SHGs, etc.) and has been promoting their exotic food products, grown in the foothills of the Himalayan mountain ranges. He has over a decade of experience in working closely with the farmer community and helping them with sustainable livelihood, and economic growth.

While interacting with the farmers he realised that the banking community are not providing financial services to the farmers, due to remote location; thus the farmers are relying on local money lenders for their financial needs. Most often, these money lenders charge an exorbitant interest rates, as high as 10% per month, on the loan amount; thereby forcing the farmers to fall under debt trap of these money lenders.

Gunajit, after realising the problem, built a team of IT experts and Financial risk managers to come up with the solution of using digital medium to provide financial services to these smallholder farmers; using simple Android based mobile application for loan and insurances.

The data collected during the loan application form, is used to generate a credit assessment model by using proprietary algorithm to determine the creditworthiness of the farmers, based on their farming activity and immediate income generation capabilities.

We have been operational since 2022, whereby we completed our Pilots with 1 NBFC, that supported us in providing loans to 112 beneficiary farmers with each loan amount between US $60 - US $360, with a loan tenure between 3-6 months. About 80% of our beneficiary farmers were first time borrowers or New-to-credit consumers; with no prior credit history.

We have also done insurances, through our insurance Broker partner, of over 125 livestock, mostly pigs; whereby about 90% beneficiaries were women farmers (owners of the livestock), belonging to backward communities.

We have achieved a total AUM (Asset under Management) of US $26,360/-; and have pipeline of US $180,000/- loan leads.

Since our sector is Agri-finance targeting to the smallholder farmer community, not many mainstream VC funds are interested in this sector.

Thus, through Solve; we hope to attract social investors who would be interested to invest in our solution.

Also, we are currently looking to expand our Tech team for developing AI models for voice recognition solution (multilingual) for using it as loan applications; thus we hope through Solve's network, we would be able to attract like minded problem solvers.

Ours is a patented solution, and has the following attributes:

Easy Access – Digital platform/mobile application based online form that can be directly filled by a Farmer or any educated youth (man/woman) known to the farmer. Future features will include multilingual/ vernacular language form.

Data Driven – Our platform will capture over 80 individual parameters of each farmer, including Basic KYC, Total cultivable farmland, GPS coordinates, Soil Data, Total livestock, crop cultivated, plantations, irrigation facilities, farm equipment, etc. Such data is useful to provide agronomy & agro-economical estimate as well as future prediction on market price, produce availability, and/or fertiliser/pesticide demand.

Affordable – Instead of the upto 24% interest p.a that NBFCs/MFIs charges for rural loans, our on-boarded Banks will charge as per Govt. market standard of upto 7% p.a for KCC (Kisan Credit Card) loans or upto 12% p.a. for other loan.

Reduced NPA – Our proprietary algorithm based programme will do an automated risk assessment and analysis on creditworthiness of each farmer and highlight the financial capability of the farmer, which will be provided in our proprietary Scorecard as a report for Banks/NBFCs/MFIs to be considered as a benchmark for considering lending to the 100mn farmer community of India

We expect our solution to have a positive impact on the lives of the smallholder farmers that we are catering too currently.

Financial Inclusion - Our proprietary credit scorecard will be India's first to estimate the financial worthiness of a farmer. With our credit report, Banks/MFIs/NBFCs and Insurance agencies can better understand the financial capabilities of farmers and can provide financial services like crop loan, livestock insurances and working capital requirements of the farmer community.

Social Impact - With our mobile application and digital platform, we plan to onboard smallholder farmers, about 12.5 Cr of them throughout India.

Economical Impact - Our technology will enable farmers the dignity of labour and help them secure appropriate services from BFSI sector at affordable cost, thus helping them grow their income generating potential and help them earn sustainable livelihood.

Impact assessment can be directly determined by the numbers of farmers onboard the platform and the amount of financial services each availed in the form of loan and/or insurance.

Our impact objectives is to provide financial inclusion of small and marginal farmers and help them become more financial literate.

Our impact will have a direct co-relation to the income generation capabilities of a farmer; and indirect correlation to her/his overall health and well being.

With better income, a farmer will be able to take appropriate care for her/his health and also fulfil the aspirations of her/his family.

Better education for the children, access to better health care; a healthy and overall a happy lifestyle

Role of ICT in your Business

We use 3-tier client-server architecture, wherein the clients are the end users' devices such as mobile, laptops, desktop’s etc and the host computer is a remote server.

Technology Stack (platform wise):

Mobile App:

• Flutter SDK

• Framework – Android Native

• Language – Java

• RESTful API:

• Framework – Flask

• Language – Python

Dashboard:

• Framework - Codeigniter

• Language – Php

• Database Engine- MySQL

Web Servers:

• Flask App- Nginx

• Dashboard – Apache 2

AWS:

• EC2- T1 Micro Ubundu 16.0

• RDS- MySQL

Communication between the client and the server is done through JSON requests.

The farmers and the agents who are the primary users can send data to the server using any of the client applications i.e Android or Web application, the RESTful API performs all the related CURD operations, and the data is stored in a relational database. The Secondary or the Internal users uses a dashboard to access the same APIs to get data as well as many other reports.

The application server has separate layers for business logic and data access And sits in a secured cloud computing environment powered by amazon web service(AWS). It has all the security configurations enabled as well as performance-oriented services such as load balancer and API.

Highly flexible and scalable to meet any demand and easy to deploy.

ICT is the core of our business. Our solution for providing financial inclusion services to small holder farmers rely entirely on ICT and digital platform. We have developed our own proprietary algorithm, as well as our own mobile application and web dashboard for supporting our company's core business. We also rely heavily in real-time data collection, including over 80 individual parameters, that are stored in our AWS cloud server. Our creditworthiness scorecard are generated digitally based on our proprietary algorithm. We also do digital KYC verification for all our loan applicant, as well as agri businesses. Our creditworthiness scorecard will be the first of its kind in India, which will align or complement CIBIL score, but for farmers.

We have developed the first of its kind technology and process for determining credit worthiness of smallholder farmers. We have received the patent for the same.

Patent No. 422414 [Granted]

The details of the same can be viewed using the portal https://iprsearch.ipindia.gov.in/PublicSearch/

Full time staff: 7 persons [Salaried]

Part-Time/Contract/Other Workers: 50 persons [on commission basis]

We have been working on this solution since 2019; thus about 5 years. We registered our company on 01/01/2020

Our organisation is an equal opportunity company; with people from diverse background and ethnicity/religion working with us.

Both the co-founder below to different Tribal community (indigenous community) of India. The Tech team comprises of Tribal as well as Upper class Hindu community members. The Operations team comprises of followers of different faith/religions. The team comprises of believer of 3 different religions.

The education qualifications of the the entire team is diverse. While the founders have MBA degrees from premier B-schools; the tech team are all Engineering graduates; while the operations team has M.Sc. and MSW profiled employees.

The team comprises of persons belonging to 3 different states in India.

Our business model comprises the following:

• Connect with Banks/NBFCs and Insurances agencies to provide financial services to our onboarded farmers. Pitch them to consider our Creditworthiness scorecard as a primary parameter to determine financial capabilities of Farmers/Farmer Collectives.
• Connect with new FPCs/farmer collectives and onboard them in our platform to help them determine their creditworthiness and then offer them financial services through onboarded Banks/NBFCs & insurance companies.

• Commissions on Loan – 6-11% of approved loan amount
• Commission on Insurance – 15% on insured amount
• BaaS (banking as a service) - Subscription model
• Channel Partner (Agribiz & Agritech) – Commission on Sales (upto 30%)

• Forward (financial services) - Banks/NBFCs & Insurance Companies
• Backward (data collection) - Farmer Companies/Farmer Collectives/Agribusiness, Field Agents, Individual Farmers
• Auxiliary – Agribusinesses for Farm Machinery, Farm Equipment, etc.

Our agri-fintech solution requires us to have our own banking/NBFC license, as per the new guideline of the RBI (Central Bank) of India.

We are in the process of raising fund for it.

So far, we have raised US $156K as grant, equity & Cloud credit through various institutions (Incubators, Accelerators, Foundations, etc.) as well as HNIs.

Equity: US $18K [HNI]

Grants: US $78K [Incubators/Accelerators/Competition]

Cloud Credits: US $60K [Accelerators/Competition]