Improving the quality of life for all: FINANCIAL INCLUSION

Background

Banking institutions play a key role in offering individuals and businesses access to useful and affordable financial products and services, such as loans and credit. In order to improve the financial services offered and to better serve wider segments of the population, financial institutions can take advantage of big data and automated tools.

Challenge statement

Financial institutions in Rwanda are in need of automated scoring tools for credit products that can help assess loan applications and risk in an automated way.

Bank of Kigali Plc is looking for an automated scoring solution for credit products, which can provide instant customer loan request assessment based on a customer’s financial transaction history, past credit behaviors, socio-demographic information and lastly the customer’s source of income (formal or informal sector). Currently, most lending decisions are entrusted to individual loan officers and specialists who evaluate loan applicants on an individual basis. These underwriting processes are not only labor-intensive, but could also be influenced by personal bias. Automated scoring tools are viewed as a better alternative that could increase efficiency and effectively improve customer experience. The automated scoring solution for credit products will help Bank of Kigali to digitally onboard the existing customer base and improve the loan application process.
The Development Bank of Rwanda (BRD) is looking for support to develop an agriculture credit scoring system that needs to use data in classifying its clientele and group them in risk categories that will minimize projects failure after financing. This can only be possible if the scoring system is based on Big Data from the agriculture sector so to have sound simulations (activities performed, linked operating expenses, volumes produces/unit, type and size of transactions, profits/losses…) that would help the bank take informed risks.