NPF Launch mobileFund
The Solomon Islands National Provident Fund launched its new product dubbed as the Instant Digital Nanoloan “mobileFund” on the 26th of March, 2024 at the Heritage Park Hotel in Honiara.
Delivering his key note address to mark the launching, the SINPF General Manager Mike Wate appreciated the continued interest in SINPF’s efforts to serve all Solomon Islands, first through youSave, youSave loMobile and now through mobileFund.
Today’s launch is momentous that’s why I am proud to present youSave’s “mobileFund” to you today, a service that our youSavers will access by dialling *673# and money deposited in their M-Selen account, all this in a space of under 60 seconds, let me repeat a time of only seconds.
The more you save with youSave, the higher the loan that you qualify for. This solution kills two birds with one stone: it helps people both to save, and provides access to credit.
We are also extremely grateful for the support from Solomon Finance Limited (SFL) for extending their partnership to this pilot, and to Our Telekom and M-SELEN, who agreed to come onboard as a partner for loan disbursements and repayments.
With continued technical assistance from UNCDF, we participated in the Pacific Islands Fintech Innovation Challenge in July 2022 and identified a suitable lendtech partner, YABX, to provide a custom credit scoring technology to us, that is based on youSavers’ and the Solomon Islands context.
GM Wate has revealed that the informal sector to-date has reached a total savings portfolio of $82.7 million with a membership of 42,225 members of which 53% of these members are female.
He highlighted there is a bit of history to this story. After the initial success of youSave, and the innovation of youSave lo mobile, where we used phone credit to make financial deposits for the first time, we noticed reductions in the sign-up rate and active user base.
“We proceeded to conduct some data analytics on our user data, and hosted some strategic discussion sessions with our management team and UNCDF to explore the underlying reasons” He said.
“We all know that it is wise to save money into our pension for later in life. At the same time, we also know that many Solomon Islanders need access to finance, and saving their money away with SINPF for the long-term may be a barrier.
Our first thought was to increase withdrawal points and opportunities, to give users more flexibility. However, after diving deeper into the issue, we realized that we want people to save more, not less. We identified a need to improve our value proposition for the youSave clientele base; a need to offer value-add services that would not only encourage them to save, but indeed to do so more frequently.
He said today the majority of youSave members are MSMEs operating in the informal sector, so access to credit is a real challenge, especially if you are unbanked with no banking transactions that can be leveraged for credit scoring purposes.
When we started exploring the options for a small loan because for MSMEs, a microloan can be that lifeline their business needs to survive. So this is where we found our innovation: an instant, digital loan that is based on alternative data, like how often one saves, for credit scoring purposes.
“We are grateful to the Central Bank of Solomon Islands for their support and to this pilot. Behind the scenes, there has been a lot of hard work by all our teams to make this happen today.
We are proud to pilot “mobileFund”: the country’s first instant digital loan based on real-time AI-powered credit scoring technology right here in the Solomon Islands.
The launching ends with GM Wate officiates the launch of the pilot with a signing ceremony of the Sandbox agreement between the SINPF and the CBSI.
Present in the launching the Deputy Governor of Central Bank of Solomon Islands, Raynold Moveni, Australia High Commission Office, UNCDF Technical Specialist, Zoe Victoria Tate, Senior Government Officials and the Board and Management of SINPF, Solomon Telekom Ltd and Solomon Finance Ltd
