A massively more inclusive credit score, with Charles Wandia (gnuGrid CRB)

How to Lend Money to Strangers

Brendan le Grange

Credit, Fintech, Management, Lending, Banking, Business, Careers

5 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 29 February 2024

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The story of East African fintech is built around the mobile phone. Not the smartphone, mind you, but the humble feature phone. In markets where all but the most significant of locations lacked an established infrastructure of landlines and local bank branches, these phones leapfrogged both: powered by pre-paid sim cards that often served as a secondary currency and cleverly leveraged USSD technologies. But it has been seventeen years since M-PESA arrived on the scenes and yet traditional credit tools have often failed to cross the floor - in Uganda, the credit bureaus are filled with the data of there are just 2.4 million traditionally banked consumers, while a further 14 million sit waiting, with their data-rich mobile banking histories all but ignored.

But no more. In today's epsidoe I'm speaking to Charles Wandia of gnuGRID who, with Airtel, have built a national-level mobile credit score.

gnuGRID is the first and only indigenous credit reference bureau in Uganda, enabling financial inclusion through credit information sharing - and you can find them online at https://gnugridcrb.com/

You can also watch the official launch of that score at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VbEI_0l57A&t=19s

gnuGRID is also on LinkedIn, of course, as is Charles Wandia: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charles-wandia-983b4a65/

As you'll hear on the show, Charles also offers tailor-made training on credit scorecard development via Credit Tick Consulting at https://www.linkedin.com/company/credit-risk-tick-consulting/

Speaking of LinkedIn, that's where you can also find and connect with me: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendanlegrange (please do reach out, follow the show's page, and share the content with your networks)

Meanwhile, my action-adventure novels are on Amazon, some versions even for free, and my work with ConfirmU and our gamified psychometric scores is discussed at https://confirmu.com/ and on episode 24 of this show https://www.howtolendmoneytostrangers.show/episodes/episode-24

If you have any feedback or questions, or if you would like to participate in the show, please feel free to reach out to me via the contact page on this site.

Keep well, Brendan

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Now we don't want to focus on the 5% but rather how do we bring the 95% on board because I have a view of how much
0:09.2	potential it has into changing people's life what I'm telling you is that in the banking environment in Uganda,
0:16.8	they're about 2.4 million borrowers.
0:19.4	And all the bureaus are targeting banked population.
0:23.2	On the mobile wallet, they are 14 million.
0:26.0	So if there's a bank willing to scale,
0:28.6	this is the way, but in credit you have to come with data. So how do we target? You work with Airtel to say let's bridge
0:36.9	this gap. Why don't we utilize that data together with Bureau data and come up with a credit score.
0:43.3	I love a good adventure story,
0:49.3	fine draped impenetrable forests filled with wild beasts, lost rivers
0:56.4	and the promise of untold gold. It's what inspired my own books.
1:00.5	Draken is available for free as an e-book on Amazon and Butterfly Hill for just a few bucks, but more to the point, it's what inspired my line of thinking for this intro.
1:10.0	You see, today we're talking about Uganda, a country that in my colonial educated brain
1:15.7	is immediately associated with David Livingston and Henry Morton Stanley
1:20.3	and the search for the source of the Nile.
1:23.0	It turns out though that that story is more complicated than I remembered and that the true source
1:28.3	of the Nile is probably in the hills of Burundi.
1:31.6	So yeah, still. But windy impenetrable forest with its mountain
1:36.0	guerrillas and the cabali forest with its chimpanzees and, well, one of the disputed sources of the Nile are calling me.
1:44.8	So perhaps I'll visit soon.
1:46.6	Welcome to how to lend money to strangers
1:49.2	with Brendan LaGrange. range. Charles Wendia. Charles Wandaia, head of Data Science at New Grid CRB, the first ever
	...

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