Digitisation
Digitisation
To reduce face-to-face meetings, as well as our microfinance institutions' reliance on cash and lending costs, the Recovery Lending for Resilience Program is accelerating VisionFund's ongoing investment in digital and mobile technologies.
Digitisation
The current COVID-19 crisis has shown how vital it is for our microfinance institutions to move to a cashless, mobile and digital collection environment.
We are focusing on rolling out mobile money in all countries where our microfinance institutions operate. These actions will reduce VisionFund’s cost of lending operations and extend our reach to areas currently too remote.
Mobile money and digital collections improve the services we can provide clients during times and in locations where it is not always practical to visit a branch; and also help prevent the spread of infection. Loan officers can support our clients remotely and quickly at the touch of a button.
The Recovery Lending for Resilience program aims to improve our digital provision with significant investments in twelve of the network MFIs with further innovations in the other sixteen.
Digitisation progress
Progress on raising funding for technology, particularly in Africa as well as Guatemala, has been positive.
Five complete digital transformations with new core banking systems have started with the requirements gathering phase and vendor selection phase as well as four other focused mobile money and digital field application projects to complete this component.
In Guatemala, full funding has now been allocated to support VisionFund Guatemala’s digital transformation. Its new Core Banking System, Musoni, is expected to be implemented over the latter half of the 2021 fiscal year.
Over in Malawi, $56,000 was allocated to complete VisionFund Malawi’s digital transformation, meaning that by June 2021 they will be able to capture client details and loan applications digitally, and process them efficiently with a modern core banking system.
We have large scale core banking system replacements, mobile money and mobile banking implementation in Kenya, DRC, Mali, Senegal, Uganda, Ghana, Mexico, and Guatemala.
We're excited to see our microfinance institutions improve their digitisation and efficiency, so that our clients can recover more strongly, more rapidly, and with more hope for the future.
Case study - Myanmar
Results from our nearly complete project in Myanmar show that Credit Officer productivity increased using digital and mobile money solutions.
Field offices have improved their productivity by 30% due to the elimination of field collections, enabling field officers to reallocate time to more productive activities including client outreach and delinquency management.
- VisionFund Myanmar has developed over 20 custom credit checks within its core banking system to assess credit risk based on a variety of client and loan data. Automation of these credit checks is estimated to reduce the loan assessment process by more than 3,000 hours per month across the organization.
- Improved loan assessment turnaround time from 3 days to 1 day due to elimination of manual data entry process.
- Improved field officer productivity by 30% in some areas due to elimination of field collections, enabling field officers to reallocate time to more productive activities including client outreach and delinquency management.
- Ability to efficiently collect loan applications during COVID-19 due to field officers having remote access to core banking system.
VisionFund Digital Solutions
Learn how VisionFund is using digital solutions (tablets and mobile phones) to provide financial services to clients impacted by COVID-19.