Financing everyday essentials for everyone, with Mayur Patel (M-Kopa)

How to Lend Money to Strangers

Brendan le Grange

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

5 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 27 July 2023

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We Finance Progress... when you visit www.m-kopa.com you're met with this brief but powerful message that, I think, captures the dual business and social impacts of their connected financing platform. In today's episode, I speak to Mayur Patel, Chief Commercial Officer at M-KOPA, about financing life-changing assets collateralized by the service those assets provide. And we talk about a lot more. M-KOPA was founded in 2010 to combine the power of digital micropayments with GSM connectivity to make life-enhancing assets more accessible and has since deployed $1 billion in products and credit to the financially excluded.

"For the majority of our customers - over three-quarters of our customers today - this is the first time they are owning a 4G handset. Those individuals are living under 4G wireless spectrum that's above their heads, but it's really been the affordability of the handset, which is the gateway into that. We've been able to build a strong credit profile for them. That’s unique. We're building a consumer FinTech business here, where the first step with our customers is to help them get access to a productive asset, and then use that as a way to bring them into a much broader financial relationship."

M-Kopa is at https://m-kopa.com/ (and on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/m-kopa/)

Mayur Patel is on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/mayur-h-patel/

You can learn more about myself, Brendan le Grange, on my LinkedIn page (feel free to connect), my action-adventure novels are on Amazon, some versions even for free, and my work with ConfirmU and our gamified psychometric scores is at https://confirmu.com/ and on episode 24 of this very show https://www.howtolendmoneytostrangers.show/episodes/episode-24

If you have any feedback, 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.

Regards, Brendan

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Transcript

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0:00.0	And for the majority of our customers over three quarters of our customers today, this
0:06.0	is the first time they are owning a 4G handset.
0:10.4	Those individuals are living under a 4G wireless spectrum that's above their heads, but it's
0:16.2	really been the affordability of the handset, which is the gateway into that.
0:20.1	We've been able to build a strong credit profile for them.
0:24.0	And then also, once the customers paid off their first product with us, we've now got an
0:28.3	incredibly rich data profile on them that's unique.
0:33.3	We're building a consumer fintech business here.
0:36.1	Where the first step with our customers is to help them get access to a product of asset
0:41.2	and then use that as a way to bring them into a much broader financial relationship.
0:53.0	The standard model for electrifying homes is for the government to borrow a huge sum of
0:57.7	money to build a huge central power station and then to pipe that power to every house within
1:03.3	range, building us every month for decades until that initial investment has been recouped.
1:08.7	But if you were, say, to find yourself in an unconnected community, you don't have much choice
1:14.3	but to petition your local representatives and wait. And wait. And wait, you couldn't
1:21.1	build your own power plant and electricity is expensive to transport. So sometimes the
1:26.3	economics just didn't make sense, especially in developing markets where government budgets are
1:32.1	already stretched tight and infrastructure often needs to be built from the ground up.
1:36.9	This is why solar power has so much appeal. All of a sudden you can bring the power
1:41.6	production to your village or even to your house. But though the scale of the whole operation
1:47.4	has shrunk, the problem of a relatively high initial upfront investment persists for the individual.
1:53.6	And they can't issue bonds or print currency. That's the problem in co-puff first
	...

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