Accessing the informal sector has often been seen as the possible game-changer that could prove vital in revolutionizing Nigeria’s quest for economic diversification.
Experts believe this would help in carrying along Nigerians that have been financially excluded.
For many Nigerian farmers, traders, civil servants etc, cooperative societies have greatly assisted in providing the needed capital/loans for business start-ups, house rents, school fees, and other ventures.
For these cooperative societies, providing seamless services is vital to expand market reach and effective presence within the public space.
FinTech has helped in this regard.
Enter ASUSU – a FinTech digital solution for African cooperatives as well as micro-finances.
Based in Abuja and led by a team of seasoned financial experts and ICT experts, ASUSU is a solution that seeks to bridge the financial digital divide in Africa, aimed at helping cooperatives and cooperators (members of the cooperatives) digitalize and manage their records. This is a community of people who are key contributors to micro-finance in Africa.
The ASUSU solution is designed to help cooperators manage savings and loans collected, build credit scores which could be translated and used in mortgages, credit purchases, amongst others.
Why ASUSU?
Nigeria’s informal sector savings mostly are through thrifts and this accounts about 10% of what goes through the informal trade market estimated at $12 -14 billion yearly.
According to Chattam house findings, a large chunk of Nigeria’s external border trade is still unrecorded and untaxed –
To better the lives of informal sector participants who are largely using the cooperative model, the need to digitize remains very important as the ripple effect affects every stakeholder.
Consequently, ASUSU solutions is designed to help cooperators build credit scores which could be translated and used in mortgages, credit purchases, amongst others.
Features
- MANAGE CONTRIBUTIONS / DEDUCTIONS
The platform gives cooperatives to manage their contributions (savings) history and loan repayments details all cooperators little manual computation time and cooperators access to information on the spot.
- SEND CUSTOM SMS
Cooperators (member of the cooperatives) can receive SMS periodically giving them summary of their savings and loans to constantly keep them informed with the status and activity of their account. Before now members have to go to cooperative office and request for this information which can be time consuming and inefficient.
- LOAN REQUEST
Members can request for loan and get automatic response, this feature will help reduce the loan application process, which currently can last in some cases from one (1) week to few months depending on the size of the cooperative.
- DASHBOARD
See and manage all transactions, request, customer complaints, and analytics for business intelligence.
- INTELLIGENT REPORTS
See all transactions summary from a single view to help you make faster decisions, loan repayments, frequency of request, etc.
- SECURITY AND FRAUD PROTECTION
Enterprise grade level encryption is built into ASUSU with modern tools employed to protect you from fraud and identity theft.
The ASUSU platform has been designed for the different type of cooperative out there with the aim to ease their work, increase profitability, efficiency and effectiveness while providing an identity for their members.
The platform is in its beta stage with over 10,000 cooperative already signed up to their platform by January, 2018.