Jamborow and UTU partner to Advance Financial Inclusion in Africa.
The two innovative companies will work together to integrate the UTU Trust and Creditworthiness APIs into Jamborow’s platform to enhance trust in B2B financial activities in the grassroots.
UTU and Jamborow have partnered to integrate the UTU Trust and Creditworthiness APIs to help strengthen Jamborow’s existing credit check features and data digitization initiatives.
Jamborow is a fintech platform that provides access to financial services to the unbanked and underbanked populations across Africa to promote financial inclusion and economic empowerment.
By digitizing KYC data, leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain and other social performance tools, Jamborow ensures clients such as traditional lenders, associations, co-operatives, agricultural and micro-finance banks digitise their businesses. In addition, Jamborow provides other financial products and social economic development solutions to customers to help people move out of poverty.
What is UTU?
UTU is a decentralized trust infrastructure provider building new models of digital trust via artificial intelligence and blockchain. By leveraging these two technologies, UTU is building tools that include API-based products and a blockchain protocol to ensure trust can’t be bought or manipulated.
The UTU Trust API can be integrated into apps to allow for ratings, reviews, personalized recommendations and data-driven trust signals to help consumers and businesses make the best decisions for their situation. The UTU Creditworthiness API also leverages data to help lenders and borrowers make better decisions based on trust from a variety of creditworthiness signals generated via machine learning models.
First, integrating UTU’s Creditworthiness API into Jamborow’s platform will improve the process of evaluating borrowers within savings groups, popularly known as Savings and Credit Cooperative Organizations (SACCOs), in East Africa; Ajo & Esusu in Anglophone West Africa; Tontines in Francophone West Africa; and Stokvels in Southern Africa. This will significantly strengthen Jamborow’s existing credit scoring algorithm.
These traditional microlending and saving institutions have conducted financial transactions in a regulated way, albeit manual. This means that members are locked out of the larger financial system due to a lack of formal credit scores. UTU and Jamborow will work together to gather various data points that will improve creditworthiness assessments and make the lending process hassle-free for both groups and members. The API will ingest various forms of transactional and KYC data to train models of high accuracy and precision in determining creditworthiness. This data includes historical and new repayment information from bank, mobile money and P2P transactions.
Secondly, UTU and Jamborow will also integrate UTU’s Trust API to show trust signals and connection-based recommendations to groups and members signed up on the Jamborow platform. Lenders and borrowers will be able to evaluate each other by assessing relational metrics, in addition to the financial metrics provided by the Creditworthiness API to make better financial decisions.
The two companies are currently exploring the best ways to share data to improve their products and services while preserving the privacy of the end-users.
“The UTU trust system will allow the Jamborow business platform to enhance our robust credit scoring algorithms to create a credit footprint for traditional saving groups customers in order to access financial services products in our ecosystem. UTU Trust system also provides another layer of approval for our clients for better decision making. This partnership between both companies will enhance Jamborow's beyond inclusion model to alleviate poverty for our African people.”
— Moses Onitilo, Co-Founder and CTO of Jamborow
“We have been friends with the Jamborow team for years now and have grown together. I am super excited that we are finally integrating our products to support the drive for financial inclusion for the underbanked communities in Africa. At UTU, we have always acknowledged the power of community and “chamas” in the continent to drive change. I am looking forward to seeing the fruits of leveraging the two technologies we’re working with today, artificial intelligence and blockchain, to build social capital and growth in the grassroots.”
— Jason Eisen, Co-Founder and CEO of UTU
About Jamborow
According to World Bank data, 400 million of the adult African population are unbanked (65% of the population). We at Jamborow are here to solve that problem. Jamborow is focused on digitizing KYC data for savings groups and creating credit footprint through automation and digitization, for financial inclusion for the grassroots of Africa.
Our ecosystem is built around the massive unbanked population in Africa; other financial service stakeholders (legacy banks, insurance companies, pension providers, financial literacy advocates, capital markets participants); and non-financial stakeholders (renewable energy providers, affordable housing providers, logistics companies).
Jamborow is an African-founded and led company headquartered in the UK, with operations in Africa. It has local registrations in Lagos, Nigeria and Mombasa, Kenya.
Learn more about Jamborow: website, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram.
About UTU
UTU is building the trust infrastructure of the internet to help businesses and consumers engage and transact in an easier, safer, and more trustworthy way.
UTU’s AI-based API products collect and analyze data to create trust signals and personalized recommendations that help consumers and businesses make the best decisions for their situation. And the UTU blockchain protocol rewards users for trustworthy actions and compensates them for sharing their data while protecting their privacy.
UTU changes the economics of trust, ensures trust can’t be bought or manipulated, and leverages data to help people make better decisions.
Learn more about UTU: website, Twitter, Telegram, LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.
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