Blog | iDE Ghana increases access to sanitation with help of innovative credit assessment from LenddoEFL

Partnership allows Ghanaians to purchase their first toilets

Globally, 32% of people lack access to a toilet in their homes (Source: WHO UNICEF JMP). In Ghana an astonishing 87% of people do not own a toilet. And in rural Northern Ghana, it is worse still. Two out of every five children in northern Ghana are stunted, compared to approximately 20% of children stunned nationally (Source: UNICEF).

iDE Ghana, a nonprofit that creates income and livelihood opportunities for poor rural households, wanted to improve sanitation in the region. They began by applying design thinking to understand the low rate of toilet use. It turned out that people didn’t know where to buy a toilet, and if they did, it was prohibitively expensive to buy.  People could not afford the full cost all at once, and there were no options to pay for a toilet over time, as there were for other large purchases.

"What we found was the criteria for borrowing towards non-income generating loans were ridiculous. So we set up a one stop shop for toilets and sanitation products, selling them door to door,” explained Valerie Labi, WASH Director at iDE Ghana. “And the beauty of the model is that we give our customers 6 to 18 months to pay the toilet off over time.”

This seemed like the perfect solution given the challenges to toilet purchasing uncovered, but it was still challenging. “We allowed people to pay over the course of 6 to 18 months but we required for the customer or a guarantor to prove their income with bank statements or payslips. And this was a big deterrent. No one wanted to give their bank statements to a toilet company. And it would take an average of 40 days to get through the process” Labi shared. “We realized these requirements were scaring away customers as they’d never had formal credit before. So we asked ourselves, how else could we assess creditworthiness in a more inclusive way?”

That’s when they came across LenddoEFL universal credit assessment. By collecting behavioral and psychometric data at the time of application, iDE’s commercial agents will be able to assess risk and make a decision in a day or less, cutting down the time to sale greatly. Previously, the commercial agent made multiple calls and visits to collect the required documents. By using the LenddoEFL score, iDE removes the need for a guarantor or proof of income for the best scoring customers. Low scorers will need to pay 50% of the cost of the toilet in monthly installments before receiving the toilets.

iDE’s goal is to provide 20,000 to 25,000 toilets to households in Northern Ghana. At an average of 11 people per household, this will provide life-saving sanitation for 275,000 people. And the plan is to sell toilets as part of a fast, convenient customer-driven process and at affordable rates. With the LenddoEFL assessment in place since February 2018, iDE is already receiving positive feedback for customers who enjoy the process. Stay tuned for updates on this exciting partnership.

Blog | Our Commitment: Privacy, Responsibility, Choice and Control

By: Richard Eldridge, LenddoEFL CEO

Data privacy and security is a top priority at LenddoEFL and with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) deadline coming up, we wanted to share our thoughts on this topic.

Our work toward a more financially inclusive future for one billion people brings with it important responsibilities, none more important than keeping customer data private and secure.

Our Responsibilities

Privacy is one component of a broader set of responsibilities we have as a global financial technology company.

1. Customer Protection and Privacy

We follow these five principles across our operations:

• Customer Data Ownership: Data we collect will always remain the property of the customer who shared their information with us and we will always safeguard the data as if it were our own. LenddoEFL uses world-class security standards in the transfer, storage, and processing of information to ensure that customer data is kept secure at all times. We never store data for longer than is necessary or authorized. Any information we permanently store is anonymized and encrypted. Where third party services are required, we only enlist the assistance of industry recognized players that adhere to the same or stricter standards than we do. In addition, security checks and penetration testing are conducted on a regular basis to ensure the security of our platform. See our full Security Policy here. 

• Consent-Driven Access: LenddoEFL only accesses data that customers share with us and all information gathered requires their explicit consent.

• Inclusive Use: Data shared with LenddoEFL is used with the sole purpose of enabling greater financial inclusion for each customer.

• Transparent Handling: Data shared with us is not--and will never be--shared without the consent of the person to whom it belongs. We will never share a customer’s data or sell it to another third party except their financial institution that is our client. Furthermore, we will only use the data for purposes the customer has agreed to.

• Unbiased Application: When building a credit model, no discriminatory variables—such as gender, race, and political or religious preferences— are taken into consideration.

For more details, read our full Privacy Policy.

2. Responsible Lending

When used properly, credit is a powerful tool for alleviating poverty, stabilizing income inequality, and empowering people to thrive. When used irresponsibly, credit can result in over-indebtedness, default, and economic instability. At LenddoEFL we are dedicated to building robust, proven models for our financial institution clients that enable safe, responsible data-driven decisions across the customer lifecycle with the goal of building a stable economy. 

3. Customer Choice and Control

Lastly, we believe in giving people options for financial inclusion, where they did not exist before. This involves using their own data to unlock access to savings, insurance products, and credit. With Europe’s second Payments Services Directive (PSD2) paving the way for open banking, people have increasing control over their data, and we know from experience that data can open doors to better, more affordable financial services. It makes sense to let each individual decide if and when to share their data. LenddoEFL’s credit scoring and verification tools are designed with this choice and control in mind. We allow customers to choose which data they want to share, if any, to get access to financial services from our clients. The more data someone grants us access to, the better we can understand them, and the better financial institutions can match them with appropriate offerings (pricing, terms, amount, etc).

Welcoming our New Behavioral Science Manager

In this photo, Jonathan demonstrates cultural differences in height during a field visit with loan applicants in Veracruz, Mexico.

Since our merger, we have welcomed a number of incredible new colleagues onto the LenddoEFL team. Jonathan Winkle joins us in our Boston office as our new Behavioral Science Manager. We cornered him to learn more.

Tell us about your background?

In undergrad I majored in psychology, where I developed a passion for researching the brain and behavior. To gain more experience after college, I worked in a systems neuroscience lab at MIT studying visual attention. Eventually I found my way to Duke where I earned my PhD in cognitive neuroscience. My dissertation focused on the behavioral economics of dietary choice, investigating how the mind is affected by “nudges” that can bias people towards healthy (or unhealthy) eating habits.

What brought you to LenddoEFL?

Studying behavior has always excited me because it is the ultimate endgame of our brains’ hard work, yet academic research on the topic can often be too disconnected from real-world problems. I found myself wanting to make more of an impact on society, and in this role I can leverage my experience to quickly and directly improve people’s lives around the world. As the Behavioral Science Manager for LenddoEFL, I can test a new hypothesis and apply that knowledge globally in a matter of weeks. And the better I do my job, the more people I can help get access to life-changing financial services.

What are your plans as Behavioral Science Manager?

My primary goal is to drive feature engineering. Features are the observations we collect about individuals to predict credit risk, and feature engineering is the process of discovering and creating new features to make our algorithms work better. For example, how honest a person is might be predictive of loan default, but we first need to quantify honesty as a feature to use it in a predictive model. As new features make our models more predictive and more powerful, our financial institution clients all over the world will gain a better understanding of their under-banked loan applicants.

If I am successful, we will be better at predicting if someone will repay their loans, thereby allowing our clients to make the best, most informed decisions possible. No pressure.

Across data sources, we look for ways to profile a person’s character, trying to understand how traits like honesty or conscientiousness relate to credit risk. This is a hard, but extremely important challenge.

LenddoEFL deals with both psychometric/behavioral and digital data sources. How do those differ and how do you think about each?

On the psychometric side, we engineer the form our data will take from the outset, then extract it by inserting new content (e.g., survey questions or psychometric games) into our simple, interactive assessment. We can be more hypothesis-driven when it comes to designing features in this realm.

On the digital side, we work with large, unstructured data sources where we necessarily have to be more exploratory and let the data do the talking.

Will you be working with our research advisors?

Absolutely! I am looking forward to working with leading researchers like Peter Belmi to push the envelope of our own research while also sharing the insights gained from our unique dataset with those in the field of behavioral economics. We will also be inviting more researchers to collaborate on our work.

Enough about work, what do you do for fun?

I like to rock climb, play Go, hang out with my dog Clementine (pic below), and try out new recipes in the kitchen.

What’s a fun fact about you?

I have a tattoo of Phineas Gage, a famous figure in the history of psychology and neuroscience. Gage was a railroad worker in 1848 that lost the left pre-frontal cortex of his brain when an accidental explosion sent a 3 foot iron rod rocketing through his head. Miraculously, he survived and was even able to walk himself to a doctor despite the 11⁄4 inch hole running behind his left cheek and out the top of his skull. He lived for 11 years after this event, but experienced marked changes in his personality that have been studied ever since. The story in itself is fascinating, and of particular interest to me is how Gage’s misfortune shaped theories of the mind for more than a century after the accident.

Look out for a future post from Jonathan about his field work in Mexico and learnings about group dynamics.