Helping Clients Save for the Future

“How much money do people typically imagine they should and could save for emergency needs? Is it different from what they need for their children’s education? “ These are the kind of questions that loan officers of CEP, a microfinance institution in Vietnam, were trying to answer. However, they found it difficult to set targets and saving goals for their customers. At the same time, CEP wanted to help its vulnerable clients build financial resilience for their long-term futures but their field officers had no experience or training in advising customers on their savings plans.

Under the OPTIX project, we worked with CEP to build a financial advisory services app to help field staff communicate the benefits of long-term savings to clients and advise them on the best savings plan to achieve their goals. After this effort, 96 percent of the customers said that loan officers who used the app were able to better explain the products to them. Watch this demo to learn more how this app works and how it’s making life of these loan officers easier.

Getting Loans to Clients Faster with the ACREIMEX App

OPTIX worked with ACREIMEX, a cooperative serving low-income customers in Mexico to solve a product puzzle. One of the institution’s products is a group credit loan that has played a pivotal role in its success. But we found that the product could have been an even greater success for ACREIMEX if it could only cut loan approval times. People who needed a loan quickly had to go to other financial institutions that charged far higher interest rates. Moreover, the loan process was cumbersome and extremely costly for ACREIMEX itself.

As a solution, the OPTIX team did a quick ‘research sprint,’ mapping the loan origination process to identify specific points along the journey that needed to be smoother, faster, or simpler. In essence, we put the customer at the heart of user design. Watch this demo to learn more about how Acreimex was able to cut its loan approval time from 7 days to just 3.

Microcredit to Microenterprise Loans - A Digital Onboarding Experience

The OPTIX project began working with SAJIDA Foundation, an MFI-NGO servicing low-income customers in Bangladesh, in 2015. They have been providing loans to microentrepreneurs and successful borrowers usually graduate from relatively small, general-purpose productivity loans to larger credits for their ventures.

During our collaboration, we realised that SAJIDA had found its paper-based loan process involved many steps that frustrated busy microentrepreneurs.  Different branches would also use varying approaches to customer assessment based on who was mentoring the staff on a daily basis.

It was clear that SAJIDA needed a more efficient, standardized system through which to offer its microenterprise loans. So we worked with them to build an app called the microenterprise loan origination app or ME app. Watch this demo to learn more about how the app is changing SAJIDA’s onboarding process to the extent that, today, they are rolling out this solution across all their branches.