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What is Sevi
Sevi developed a digital group lending system. We believe group solidarity continues to be the best way to loan to low-income clients, because it’s proven to limit default risks. Sevi significantly reduces your costs to screen and enroll new clients (85% cost reduction), and keeps default rates low. Our model offers a fully automated know-your-customer process, a gamified reputation score and a transparent, mobile wallet - for each group and each individual member.
What drives us
We are convinced entrepreneurship are the catalyst to growth. Entrepreneurs face many hurdles to grow their businesses from a micro to small to medium company. Access to affordable finance is one of the key issues. We are driven to overcome this gap.
Sevi team
Jeff Njagi
Jeff is a sharp mind and microfinance legend. He has 39 years of experience in microfinance and SME lending and has been the founder CEO of MESPT a wholesale microfinance institute in Kenya for 12 years, meaning his company has done due diligence and provided loans to many MFIs in Kenya. He has also been the chair of AMFI the association of MFIs in Kenya and as such let negotiations with the government and regulator on reforms in the Microfinance regulation. Jeff acknowledges the Microfinance industry needs a good balance of Tech and Touch to be future proof.
Edicah Walter Charo
Edicah is an esteemed community worker and entrepreneur in Kenya. He has 14 years of experience with group loans, community development and online/mobile commerce. As a community worker he not only knows how to work with groups, but also how to interact to get valuable feedback from the groups, to improve and enhance the Sevi product. As an entrepreneur he is well experienced with sales and deal making.
Bartel Verkruijssen
Bartel has 10 years of experience in the field of entrepreneurship, IT and telecom. He is fast at design, development and validation of proof of concepts. Bartel masters a unique combination of visionary thinking and a hands-on performance capacity. Bartel is committed and knows how to build development teams and companies. He has done this several times and after the last successful exit he is now is ready to make a lasting change in the world of inclusive finance.
Walter aan de Wiel
Walter is a strategist and doer and thinks in possibilities. He is excellent in building partnerships. As director at Enviu he co-founded 10 social enterprises in emerging markets and supported many more through the business accelerator he founded called Truvalu.startups. One of the companies he co-founded at Enviu is People’s Pension Trust, a micro pension company for the informal sector in Ghana, which won the award of Pension Company of the Year 2018.
Digital group solidarity lending model
Sevi has developed a simple-to-use mobile app, which requires two smartphones per group. The chair of a loan group creates a group and adds its members. Group members receive an invite through SMS to join the group and are run through a KYC process to be verified. Through gamified reputation scoring individuals and groups can increase their benefits.
On boarding
Sevi provides an automated extensive KYC process for financial institutions to comply with international regulation. Avoid manual ID and credit checkes or expensive API integrations with CRB and IPRS. It is all included in the Sevi app.
Gamified reputation score
To minimise risk, Sevi has developed an algorithm to calculate a reputation score per individual based on repayment behaviour, listing at other MFIs, as well as a relative credit scoring based on its close relations.
Individuals gain points through gamification. The sum of the individual reputation score forms the group score. This group score determines eligibility for a loan and maximum loan amount. By growing the group score they can grow to a next loan level with higher loan amounts and/or lower interest rates. This means all group members are incentivised for good behaviour.
Payments
An in-app wallet provides you the possibility to track the loan to make sure it is spend on the intended loan purpose. This creates valuable data for impact measurement. Moreover transaction fees are free between Sevi wallets, lowering your cost to disburse loans. All wallets have a M-Pesa integration to make payments to and from any M-Pesa account.
Demonstration
Sevi is currently demonstrating its service in Kenya. Interested to join a demonstration project? We would love to tell you more and show you how Sevi can save you operational cost and improve your PAR. Contact us at support@sevi.io.
Processing fee
Sevi provides IT infrastructure to serve the current credit providers. For this service we charge a processing fee per loan through the Sevi platform. So no initial investments and no hidden cost.