- by Cindy Ranchon
- July 29, 2022
Provide credit to the unbanked?
Asia has displayed a booming digital economy for years. Yet, half of the adult population from low and middle-income countries still do not have a bank account, hence no credit card. So when it comes to online purchases, most of it happens through cash-on-delivery, which therefore proves a real challenge to sell high-end goods online.
How might we facilitate access to credit for a large audience of unbanked customers? Could we possibly solve this by enabling payment-by-lending to individuals with no traditional credit history?
This was the challenge Experian & Jirnexu were trying to solve by mixing the expertise of the latter in designing tech solutions for e-Commerce clients with the deep knowledge in credit scoring and the banking industry from the former.
After some time discussing the matter for weeks with little progress, Experian called us in to facilitate a design sprint and help them validate the viability, feasibility and desirability of the idea.
A market ripe for disruption
In Vietnam, more than half of the population is underbanked. And 2 thirds have never had a credit card. With no traditional credit history to draw upon and no bank account for many, access to credit used to be an impossible challenge. As a result, many consumers go through loan sharks: unlicensed lenders charging exorbitant interest rates, and end up in debt. But the same people are hyper-connected nowadays. Thanks to their social media interactions and the payment of phone, service or utility bills, they produce a wealthy daily volume of data. Advances in data science and machine learning allow us to turn these alternative data into intelligence, and more specifically into a reliable credit line.
So Vietnam, where Jinerxu had also identified strong e-commerce partners showing interest for the concept and keen to share data, was identified as a relevant market to run the sprint.
We started the process by gathering intelligence, in particular a map of the customer journey and data on the consumer behaviour from an e-commerce platform keen to test the new solution. In parallel, we conducted a series of live interviews on the ground to get under the skin of the target audience and collect valuable insights.
From idea to user validation in 5 days
Conveniently, design sprint were… well, designed specifically to answer this type of challenges. With a proven 5-day framework, they allow a motivated team of individuals with the right skills set to quickly turn their challenge into a prototype and test it with users on the spot. And so we mixed the key decision makers from Experian, including a data scientist, a bank manager and a financial solution consultant with the top contributors from Jirnexu, including the CEO himself, the chief designer and the e-commerce partner manager.
We started on Day 1 by unboxing the interviews and existing material and invited experts from the e-commerce platform and a local bank to share their insights. We then had our sprint team agree on what success would look like and zero-in on what they had to achieve during the sprint to be able to move forward.
The following days can be summarized by a series of important informed decisions made quickly thanks to the inputs of the participants and a very realistic prototype built impressively fast thanks to talent of the in-house designers, live tested on Day 5 on a real target user.
Another highlight of the sprint was the capacity of the team to reimagine the process running in the back-end so that consumers would know instantly if they were eligible for a loan, requiring the platform to collect user data early on, ping the bank and produce a credit line even before users reached the checkout module.
Thanks to the ground covered, valuable user feedback and advanced prototype created in just 5 days, the sprint was unanimously considered a huge success by both Experian and Jirnexu. It also us to run other projects after that with Experian who, in parallel, deepened their relationship with Jirnexu by investing in the fintech to tackle their next challenge: the Malaysian market. (Read more about it!)
