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Navana Tech: Mobile tech for low-literates

Posted on by MSC

This blog post is part of a series that covers promising fintechs making a difference to underserved​ ​communities and supported by the Financial Inclusion Lab accelerator program​. MSC is a partner to the FI Lab​,​ which is a part of CIIE’s Bharat Inclusion Initiative.

Shop keeper

Bhavesh, 42, works at a kirana (grocery) store in Ahmedabad. Having dropped out of school in 5th grade, he struggles with using a mobile phone. So, on his smartphone he is able to call only those who are in his call log. He has to seek help to add or search for a contact or even to watch a YouTube video on his phone. How can Bhavesh maximise the use of his smartphone?

Individuals like Bhavesh need a mobile interface that goes beyond their language and literacy limitations to help them make the most of their smartphones.

A study concluded that 775 million[1] illiterate people worldwide struggle to use text-heavy smartphones. Hence, while mobile applications have found broad usage across developing countries, usability remains a major hurdle for populations with the illiterate or low literate population. Hence, literacy levels remain a key barrier to providing access to information through technology. Navana Tech offers intuitive,  text-free, voice-assisted, and image-based software development kit (SDK) that help bridge the digital divide between the literate and low-literates.

Not going by the word

When brothers and Cornell University graduates Raoul and Jai Nanavati started building products for the Indian markets, they faced a fundamental problem in the design. For example, the icon of a shopping cart could not be identified by a user who has never seen a physical shopping cart. The complex interfaces confused users in India, especially those in Tier 2 and 3 cities, dissuading them from accessing the same digital services as their literate counterparts.

 

Raoul and Jai NanavatiThrough Navana Tech, the duo developed a solution that addressed the limitations and litOS was born. At Cornell, they were one of the four student teams picked out of 45 to win a startup investment award of USD 80,000.

A pitch: Beating the literacy barrier

Navana Tech offers research-driven design standards and developer tools to assist businesses to build intuitive mobile user-interfaces. It brings localized iconography, contextual voice assistance in nine Indian languages, and plug-and-play user flows. The Navana Tech Voice Dialer feature allows users to add or search for a contact by saying the name instead of typing it.

The Navana Impact

The evolution: Making the low-literates independent in mobile usage

Boot camps, diagnostic sessions, and clinics conducted by Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE) and MicroSave Consulting (MSC) proved to be beneficial for Navana Tech. The experts advised Navana Tech to pivot their product offering from an operating system to a set of mobile applications based on SaaS model. The team also helped the company overcome challenges like:

Identifying the right user segment: The categories of mobile users in India are quite disparate in terms of literacy, access to mobile devices, and mobile literacy. It is hard to classify these categories to identify one common customer segment to target. Also, due to a lack of resources, Navana Tech struggled to conduct extensive testing on its product, and was unable to identify the product challenges faced by different user segments.

MSC helped test Navana Tech’s voice dialer application across geographies and customer segments including factory workers, Micro Finance Institution (MFI) customers, truck drivers, and shopkeepers. MSC helped Navana Tech understand the needs and abilities of different user segments while using mobile applications. The research insights helped Navana Tech to refine their offerings and target customers effectively. Eventually, it enabled the team to build a better and more user-friendly app.

  • Designing an intuitive interface: The potential target segments varied based on mobile usage and literacy. So, it was challenging for Navana Tech to design an intuitive interface for an illiterate or low literate population; that closely replicated their familiar experience of an Android phone.

With MSC’s guidance, Navana Tech narrowed down the intuitive process of adding and searching for a contact. MSC also helped the firm build relevant iconography and relatable visual cues.

MSMEs, Mobile tech for low-literates, Tanvi Maniktala MicroSave

The future is mobile-literate

Navana Tech believes that smartphone penetration, mobile data usage, and online banking will redefine the fintech landscape in India. Various discussions during acceleration, helped Navana to identify the importance of partnership to reach users on a large scale. Today, the team works closely with its partners like Ujjivan Small Finance Bank (SFB) to re-design the Ujjivan mobile app for low-literate users. Navana Tech is also in the process of on-boarding two more partners in 2019.

In the future, Navana Tech aspires to impact the lives of millions of low-literate customers like Bhavesh. The aim is to customize products for the underserved segment and increase their access to digital solutions. Accordingly, Navana Tech believes that its business can reduce the digital divide while still achieving a sustainable revenue model and business growth.

[1] Indrani Medhi Thies, User Interface Design for Low-literate and Novice Users: Past, Present and Future, Now Publishers Inc., 2015

Follow #TechForAll and #BuildingForBharat to stay updated on fintech start-ups driven to bridge the social, financial and economic inclusion gap.

SureClaim: Assurance of insurance claims

Posted on by MSC

This blog post is part of a series that covers promising fintechs making a difference to underserved​ ​communities and supported by the Financial Inclusion Lab accelerator program​. MSC is a partner to the FI Lab​,​ which is a part of CIIE’s Bharat Inclusion Initiative.

There is a huge gap between the premium collected and claims reimbursed in India. Indians are likely to spend an estimated INR 300,000 crore (USD 42 billion) in 2021 towards treatment expenditures, with the low and middle income (LMI) segments incurring a significant part of the expenses. How can these customers leverage their insurance policies to the maximum?

There is a pressing need to orient many, like 32 million Employee State Insurance (ESI) beneficiaries, and assist them in filing and claiming the entitled reimbursement claims. 

A few years ago, Anuj Jindal faced serious challenges while filing insurance claims for a family member. The troubled times made him wonder how other customers might be coping with similar issues. The numbers backed his doubts: as per FY 2016-17 data, under the ESI Scheme, the central government collected a premium of INR 14,000 crore (USD 2 billion) and paid around INR 6,000 crore (USD 857 million) to its beneficiaries. This gap between insurance premium collected and paid is a whopping 57%.

At the country level, insurance can help maintain healthy financial lives during adverse times, especially in the LMI segment. But the low penetration of insurance and the complex reimbursement process acts against the philosophy of hedging unknown risks. Together, these form an important barrier to onboard new customers.

Today millions of people in the LMI segment, including those under the ESI Scheme, need support in filing their reimbursement claims. SureClaim is here to fill the gap.

The pitch: Offering right insurance benefits to the right people

 

SureClaim is co-founded by Anuj Jindal who looks after business development and Varun Kansal who manages operations. Their experience of working at Practo, Qikwell, and other companies provided them an understanding of the vital nuances of the insurance domain. Kshitiz Gupta, a technology expert with multiple stints at renowned firms like Expedia, Adobe, and Walmart, has completed the trio.

During a year-long in-depth field research, the team helped hundreds of patients in filing their claims. In doing so, the team realized that most people were willing to pay a fee, as the SureClaim service saved them precious time and effort. More importantly, the team minimized customers’ expenditure towards items that their insurance schemes covered – which customers were neither aware of nor apprised of by the insurance companies. As a result, the customers expressed a sense of gratitude towards the SureClaim team for their support.

These research findings set the stage for SureClaim. The team validated that it was solving a crucial problem by helping people claim all that they were entitled to as per their respective insurance policies. So, SureClaim aligned its staff and core processes to optimize insurance-related benefits for its customers – a unique service not offered by many market players. The team also understood exactly what the customers expected from insurance claims. It further helped SureClaim to better assist its customers in filing claim reimbursements. Today, SureClaim takes pride in understanding claims better than most other market players.

SureClaim

The evolution: Overcoming roadblocks in the claim reimbursement proces

The Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE) and MicroSave Consulting (MSC) organized boot camps, diagnostic sessions, and clinics to advise the SureClaim team to refine its strategies and address its challenges. The team also received intensive guidance from sector experts.

For SureClaim, streamlining its processes and scaling-up was key. Under the technical assistance (TA) component of the FI lab, MSC supported SureClaim to look at their current business as well as exploring a new segment of ESI benefits.

  • MSC provided insights to SureClaim to identify the different areas of intervention during orientation and claim reimbursements. SureClaim understood that they had to build a robust partner ecosystem to fill the gaps, and design a scalable technological solution for their product.
  • On ESI front, MSC helped the team to understand the current processes followed by employers to orient employees on the benefits of ESI, thus refining their product. SureClaim team also found that employees lacked knowledge about ESI benefits and the claims-filing processes for medical reimbursements. This led the team to realize that employers required support to address their pain points – highlighting the need to build a customer service desk to reach a wider audience.

Together, this helped SureClaim to enhance their business offerings and craft better communication strategies for their audience.

The future of insurance. Claimed.

SureClaim aspires to add more capabilities to its online claims platform. These capabilities will enable users to search for their policy benefits using simple, everyday terms. They will also be able to predict all their expenses specific to a treatment which would be covered by their policy. SureClaim also seeks partnerships with service providers and insurance intermediaries who wish to deliver better claim reimbursement experience to their customers.

By covering gaps in the processes, SureClaim ensures that due claims are reimbursed in time with minimal troubles.

Follow #TechForAll and #BuildingForBharat to stay updated on fintech start-ups driven to bridge the social, financial and economic inclusion gap.

GramCover: Accessible & affordable insurance

Posted on by MSC

This blog post is part of a series that covers promising fintechs making a difference to underserved​ ​communities and supported by the Financial Inclusion Lab accelerator program​. MSC is a partner to the FI Lab​,​ which is a part of CIIE’s Bharat Inclusion Initiative.

To meet their basic needs, 70% of the agricultural households in India spend more than what they earn. This pushes them into a vicious cycle of debt – even for basic needs, let alone an emergency. According to reports, a farmer commits suicide every hour in India. In the last two decades, over 300,000 farmers’ deaths have been reported. In such grave times, is it possible to give hope to farmers?

Farmers across India need easy access to affordable insurance products that could shield them from economic losses arising due to unforeseen circumstances. 

Jatin Singh came face to face with various farmers during his previous venture Skymet Weather Services, India’s first weather forecasting company. It facilitated claim settlements for weather-based crop insurance schemes for private and public insurers. That  is when Jatin felt the lack of insurance penetration among the rural population.

During his research, Jatin realized that the insurance penetration rate in India, representing premiums underwritten as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP), is 3.69%, – while the global average is 6.13%. The insurance density, or premium per person, stands at $73 in India while the world average is $650. It is imperative to note that less than 20% of all Indians have health insurance and almost 86% of the rural population is still uninsured. Lack of understanding of insurance products and benefits among the low and middle income (LMI) segment has given rise to this situation. On the supply side, most players do not focus on LMI customer segments because of the high distribution and servicing costs involved.

“Most digital insurance solutions focus on “Do-It-Yourself” (DIY)[1] applications and they cater to a segment that has the relevant infrastructure and understand such solutions. Moreover, web aggregators and brick-and-mortar insurance intermediaries mainly deal with urban segments,” says Jatin.

With such a disparity, offering suitable and affordable insurance products can help transform the lives of LMI population, particularly in rural areas. GramCover aims to do just that. 

The pitch: Easy access to affordable insurance

GramCoverJatin conceived the idea of GramCover – a rural insurance distribution start-up and Rishabh Garg as well as Dhyanesh Bhatt joined in later as CTO and CEO respectively. The app aims to tap into the unserved markets and offer customized insurance products to LMI customers. GramCover intends to make insurance accessible at affordable rates via a digital platform.

GramCover works with insurers, reinsurers, and risk managers to co-create easy to understand insurance products at affordable prices. These insurance products include life, health, crop, cattle, and motor. Moreover, Rishabh’s experience in the lending space for small and medium enterprises (SME) helps GramCover with a “phygital” model – a mix of the digital technology platform and traditional physical brokerage to support the delivery of insurance products to rural consumers and mitigate their risks.

GramCover offers products with the 5 must-haves to design a relevant product for rural customers:

  1. Low premium
  2. Competitive value of the policy
  3. Low turn-around-time (TAT) for claims settlement
  4. Easy documentation
  5. Approach able customer service

The evolution: Information and delivery of insurance

Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE), along with MicroSave Consulting (MSC), conducted a boot camp, provided one-to-one mentoring sessions and technical assistance (TA) to GramCover as part of the Financial Inclusion (FI) Lab. It helped GramCover refine their business model and provided alternative solutions to existing roadblocks.

  • GramCover’s primary challenge was to spread awareness about the importance of insurance products, benefits, and claims Moreover, finding the right set of partners to distribute      insurance products was also critical. The most likely partners were microfinance institutions (MFIs), non-governmental organizations (NGOs), or business correspondent network managers (BCNMs), among others.

In addition to the market scoping support, MSC assisted in the production of educational videos that focus on content development to help generate awareness about insurance among rural customers.

  • The other challenge was to integrate with existing insurers and offer relevant products that cater to the needs of the rural population.

GramCover partnered with existing insurers to achieve scalability in terms of customer base     . In return, the partners availed technology-enabled services from GramCover for better outreach. The app also delighted customers through its cost-efficient, new-age delivery techniques of insurance products.

Driven by the insights from the scoping study, GramCover assessed customer profiles of the organizations. It helped them to analyze the insurance requirements of the customers, the type of channels used to locate them, and the products and features that they currently use,  leading to a significant increase in user adoption of GramCover’s digital platform.

Shweta Menon MicroSave

The future is insured

Today, GramCover has enrolled more than 190,000 customers based on their own distribution capabilities. It aims to reach one million policies per year for the LMI segment. It plans to build a network of 25,000 point of sale (POS) locations for customers to understand and purchase policies in the next three years. To meet this demand, it seeks to integrate with at least one major insurer under each category of:

  • Life insurance
  • Motor insurance: two-wheelers, four-wheelers, or commercial
  • Health insurance

GramCover’s proprietary algorithms embedded into their tech platform assists the POS to identify the right risk cover for their customers. With customized solutions and inclusive technology, GramCover aspires to build solutions towards de-risking rural India and making insurance affordable for the rural population.

[1] DIY applications are simple and user-intuitive applications that are easily understood. These applications can be used by customers without any training or assistance.

Follow #TechForAll and #BuildingForBharat to stay updated on fintech start-ups driven to bridge the social, financial and economic inclusion gap.

EasyPlan: Simple and digital savings for LMIs

Posted on by MSC

This blog post is part of a series that covers promising fintechs making a difference to underserved communities and supported by the Financial Inclusion Lab accelerator program MSC is a partner to the FI Lab​,​ which is a part of CIIE’s Bharat Inclusion Initiative.


Rajat is a young millennial. His weekends are spent unwinding with friends – leaving him with hardly any funds by the end of the month. Yet, he manages to save in informal rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs). Since he aspires to pursue higher education, he seeks investment options that can give him better returns, without much risk. He is considering mutual funds (MFs) but is sceptical due to the risks involved. Can Rajat get expert guidance and the convenience of investing in MFs?

Young Indians with limited incomes need a simple and hassle-free option to invest in MFs – clearing their doubts about risks involved. That’s what EasyPlan plans to do.

Sanjay Gandhi and Manisha PanditaCo-founders, Sanjay Gandhi and Manisha Pandita’s partnership dates back to their Harvard University times. Since their undergraduate study, the duo has been working extensively at the intersection of technology and financial services. Sanjay honed his technical skills as a software developer for one of the world’s largest high-frequency trading firms. Manisha, on the other hand, learned about diverse customer segments during her stint as deputy global lead for financial services at Dalberg—an international development consulting firm.

 

In one of her research projects, Manisha realized that current financial products in India do not complement the low-and-middle income (LMI) segment’s financial goals such as housing, wedding, etc. LMI customers often rely on informal options, such as ROSCAs, which offer flexibility to save and borrow. Offline chit funds, a kind of ROSCA are inherently risky with the possibility of theft of the principal amount. Moreover, the practice of visiting the ROSCA meet-ups to socialize often come with a significant opportunity cost. All this, when the return offered by many ROSCAs do not even match the investments of time, money, and effort put in by the ROSCA subscribers. “LMI customers need a financial tool which they can customize according to their circumstances. They seek a flexible way to save with the protection of the principal amount, and generate safe and smart returns.” – Manisha

EasyPlan can help young Indians in LMI segment save in a smart, simple and digital way – via an app.

The pitch: An easy and flexible savings option

EasyPlan

EasyPlan encourages millennials like Rajat to set financial goals based on their needs and save regularly in a hassle-free manner. The app’s unique selling proposition (USP) is the flexibility of the product offering, such as the absence of lock-ins, penalties or minimums. Moreover, users can instantly pull their savings back into the bank accounts whenever needed. Starting at just Rs. 100 (USD 1.50), they can skip or change their contribution without incurring any penalty. Apart from all the flexibility of payments and withdrawals, EasyPlan whose product is short term duration debt mutual funds, offers potentially better returns than other formal products and better protection of the principal in comparison to other debt funds.

The evolution: Identifying challenges and overcoming them 

At the clinics, boot camps and diagnostic sessions conducted by Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE) and MicroSave Consulting (MSC), the experts mentored the EasyPlan team in crafting their business strategies. As a result, the team gained an in-depth understanding of the Indian financial ecosystem and was able to troubleshoot its business challenges and define its business model.

Building trust in MFs

The participants associated MFs with either a risky, volatile proposition of stock market or something “which is spoken very fast in advertisements” in the form of the mandatory SEBI disclaimer. Moreover, they felt that digital savings lacked a personal touch—a cornerstone of the closely knit ROSCA communities.

Here, education was the key. The Easyplan-MSC team talked to the participants and dispelled their notions about the high risks associated with MFs.   The team also imparted crucial information about MFs to people, including possible higher returns as compared to LIC endowment policy, FD, RD, savings account, etc. They also educated the participants about how the Easyplan app would customize their product offerings according to the aspirations and financial capabilities of the app users.

Selecting the right occupational segment:

The LMI workers have fluctuating incomes and are left with a scarce amount after covering basic costs such as installments for vehicle loans, fuel, and maintenance expenses. As a first step, EasyPlan had to identify the segment that has a relatively stable income so that they can allocate funds for MFs.

MSC conducted primary research in Delhi and Jaipur among LMI segments. Based on the understanding of MFs and product attributes proposed by EasyPlan, it arrived at three probable occupational categories i.e. retail workers, Uber or Ola cab driver-partners, and Zomato or Swiggy delivery boys.

This helped EasyPlan to concretize the product idea, prioritize its features, and understand competition.

The future is ‘easy’ 

EasyPlan aspires to focus on attracting more customers like Rajat and retaining their existing customers. “Collaborating with more employers and aggregators is one part of this effort. The other part is building a stronger online presence to garner the trust of customers.” – Manisha

Finally, EasyPlan will enhance the engagement on the financial product through more behavioral nudges and gamification elements. Stay tuned!

Follow #TechForAll and #BuildingForBharat to stay updated on fintech start-ups driven to bridge the social, financial and economic inclusion gap.

Finlok: Save together digitally

Posted on by MSC

This blog post is part of a series that covers promising fintechs making a difference to underserved communities and supported by the Financial Inclusion Lab accelerator program, co-powered by MSC. The Lab is a part of CIIE’s Bharat Inclusion Initiative.

Rohan, 21, works as a sales staff at a mall in Pune and makes INR 15,000 / month (USD 220). After remitting money to his parents in Bihar, and paying off expenses, Rohan can hardly save. For any emergency, he will have to borrow funds from friends or even moneylenders who may charge exorbitant interest rates. Since Rohan does not possess adequate documents, approaching a bank for his credit needs is out of question. Can Rohan come out of the vicious cycle?

A majority of low-and-middle income (LMI) customer segments typically earn approximately INR 8,000 (USD 115)-25,000 (USD 360)/- month, and rely on informal or semi-formal sources for urgent money needs. These sources include money lenders and cash-based local rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs) such as bhisi or chitti. Lack of sufficient documentation such as address proofs or credit history obstructs their access to formal credit.

In fact, the Global Findex Data 2017 stated that only 27% of adults saved formally in one year at a bank or a financial institution. There is a massive gap between people seeking avenues to save money and access credit.

Enter Finlok – an app that digitalizes the proven financial model of people saving and borrowing money, together in a peer-to- peer setting of banking and lending.

One Eureka moment, no looking back

Co-founders Atish and Tanuj bring together rich experience in building and servicing financial products – especially Finlokfor mobile wallets and in alternate lending. Atish has built numerous enterprise IT platforms, while Tanuj is a sales professional with experience of running a start-up.

The idea of Finlok was conceived when the team noted that a segment of the population was not utilizing their bank accounts. Despite massive campaigning for the Pradhan Mantri Jan-Dhan Yojana (PMJDY) scheme, many account holders have zero balances. On the other hand, ROSCAs were flourishing. These cash-based saving models were making people create a corpus beyond formal banks. For the co-founders, this gap became an opportunity.

With Finlok, they digitalized the savings group model with dual benefits – people could continue with their current models and yet, have a formal financial profile. This digitalization has a potential to help Finlok’s users access financial services like credit, insurance, and investments from formal institutions, with fewer impediments. “Other favored avenues of saving money, such as self-help groups, MFIs, banks or co-operative societies lack tech-based interfaces or are unable to match LMI people’s credit requirements. We aim to address both these limitations with one solution – the digitalization of saving models”: says Atish.

The pitch: The digital avatar of informal saving modes

The Finlok app is designed to be simple and easy to use. If a user like Rohan explores the app, he can see how, by saving small amounts of funds every month, he can save a lump sum amount of money which can be used in times of emergencies. Finlok also helps him create a digital footprint which can help him build a credit history.

The evolution: A challenge to identify the audience and convince them

Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE), along with MicroSave Consulting (MSC), conducted boot camps, diagnostic sessions, and clinics to chalk-out an impactful strategy for Finlok to help achieve their targets.

Zeroing in on the right set of customer segments is an uphill climb. The early adopter segment possesses bank accounts but cannot access formal credit. They are familiar with digital payment modes and have used bhisi or chitti. But identifying such segments is a daunting task due to the geographical expanse and the high costs involved in reaching them.

MSC assisted Finlok by conducting a market scoping study to get feedback from current customers, and to identify potential customer segments. MSC helped Finlok to narrow down on relevant customer segments such as women entrepreneurs, government school teachers, sales staff, security guards, and BPO employees in Pune and Hyderabad.

The other challenge is product adoption. At the local level, a bhisi or chitti is widely used by low-income groups. However, making them switch to digital savings groups poses a big challenge. Product adoption by the target segment revolves around three core aspects:

  1. Convincing potential users to join the digital savings groups
  2. Improving usability of the app even for the not-so-tech-savvy users
  3. Maintaining trust in the product and its offerings

Self help groupsBased on market insights, Finlok understood the importance of building user trust to mobilize them. An intuitive user-interface will also minimize dropouts – from set-up until usage stages. The user experience, including current challenges, will help Finlok refine the app to improve the stickiness.

The future is digital

Finlok plans to focus on boosting their acquisitions and activations in the near term. It aspires to emphasize on referral marketing, digital marketing and other below-the-line (BTL) marketing with target groups, as identified during the acceleration. Finlok has also been in talks with some leading organizations for strategic partnerships. Further, it intends to continually improve the app with bidding options to users in a group, customer engagement and action tracking, and bundling insurance to improve the group savings proposition.

While Finlok improves their product offerings, their focus is on empowering LMI population to build a financial profile. It gives their users, like Rohan, greater control over their finances and impacts their lives positively. With this vision, Finlok is paving the path for other fintechs looking to provide solutions for low-income segments.

Follow #TechForAll and #BuildingForBharat to stay updated on fintech start-ups driven to bridge the social, financial and economic inclusion gap.

 

 

A glimpse into the progress of the first cohort of the FI Lab

Posted on by MSC

Every start-up from the first cohort of the Financial Inclusion Lab offers a distinguished product or set of services that suit the needs of LMI segments. With MSC’s technical assistance, these start-ups have improvised their offerings and successfully strengthened their businesses. The start-ups are progressing well and have been receiving accolades across dimensions for their distinguished work. Stay tuned for more updates!