Equity Bank, Kenya’s leading bank by customers has partnered up with the leading telecom in the country, Safaricom. To make access to credit more available to the average Kenyan.
The duo will approach it with a transformation agenda. One that will see more Kenyans get access to critical financial services and products. Through this partnership, the two companies will serve the market with innovative financial solutions leveraging on finance and technology.
The two have also taken it upon themselves to create cybersecurity awareness. As the internet and technology increasingly become the go-to-platform for both telecommunication and banking companies. The threats faced in this modern world by the two sectors is almost one and the same, and it all starts and ends with cyberspace.
Bob Collymore, the CEO of Safaricom said: “We are continuously driven to explore new ways to provide our customers with the best possible experience on our network. As we continue on our journey to become a more widely accessible digital platform, symbiotic partnerships like this one will unlock new opportunities for our entire ecosystem to benefit from enriched innovation – all based on a socially conscious business model.”
His counterpart James Mwangi, the CEO of Equity Group Holding added: “Equity’s purpose is to transform lives and livelihoods of our people socially and economically by availing them modern inclusive financial services that maximize their opportunities.
We continuously champion, collaborate, and partner to bring this purpose to life. We will harvest, channel, and transmit the benefits of the robust macro-economic growth characterized by national infrastructure investments into advantages and opportunities for the ordinary Kenyans especially those in real economy, agriculture, micro, small, and medium businesses, and enterprises.”
With Equity as a money lender and Safaricom as a telecommunication service provider. The two are can both use each other’s experience and infrastructure to deploy fintech-based financial packages. Tailored especially to Kenyans in the informal sectors who remain largely a credit risk to the traditional banking credit assessment.
However, with the deployment of artificial intelligence and big data, the two are poised to better sieve out the real credit risk from people in the informal sector who just appear credit risk and thus get rejected upfront by the traditional banking creditworthiness assessments.
