African New Startups in the credit scoring space

African startups with solutions in the credit scoring and financing space will have the chance to secure a testing phase for their technologies with French utility company ENGIE at Africa Tech Summit Kigali in February.

Taking place for the third time on February 4-6, Africa Tech Summit Kigali brings together tech leaders, MNOs, banks, investors, entrepreneurs, governments, trade bodies and media to drive investment and collaboration in the African tech space.

For the second year, Disrupt Africa has reprised its partnership with Africa Tech Summit Kigali to host the two-day Africa Startup Summit, which will bring stakeholders in the tech startup space from across the continent together in Rwanda to explore the opportunities and challenges within the ecosystem.

As a Gold Sponsor of Africa Tech Summit, French multinational energy utility company ENGIE has opened applications for a pitching challenge on the Startup Summit stage to credit scoring startups with the potential to provide innovative solutions to both existing and future ENGIE customers.

It is ENGIE’s ambition to become a world leader in the zero-carbon transition “as a service” for  its customers. The company is already providing clean decentralized electricity to more than three million people in nine countries, yet is striving towards universal access to electricity through a combination of national grid extension, mini-grids and Solar Home Systems.

The key to this growth is the access to solar products, or productive appliances powered by solar, thus generating revenues for the customer, which can often prove huge barriers, particularly for low income populations. Central to this challenge is the fact that assessment of the payment capacity of potential customers can be a huge risk for the provider, and thus ENGIE is now seeking startups with innovative solutions in the scoring space to address this challenge.

The growth in smartphone penetration and increase in value of mobile money transactions in Sub-Saharan Africa means there is now an increased amount of data available, combining transactions histories and accurate demographic and geographic information with big data, artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies and accurate algorithms. This allows tech startups to build advanced services providing accurate probability scores and data valorisation schemes.

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