Five African credit scoring startups selected for ENGIE challenge at the Africa Tech Summit

French multinational energy utility company ENGIE has announced the five credit scoring startups that will pitch on the Africa Startup Summit at the Africa Tech Summit in Kigali. The ENGIE challenge is looking for startups with the potential to provide innovative solutions to both existing and future ENGIE customers.

The startups should provide proper, accurate, efficient and relevant business intelligence to improve and optimise the prospection and acquisition of future customers, financing schemes for its existing and future customers, and scenarios to valorise customer data that aim to design customer profiles and match offers to customer needs.

The five startups selected for the ENGIE challenge are:

• CARMA (Kenya): generation 2.0 of credit bureaus, built on a decentralised basis, CARMA facilitates data exchange directly between lending companies;

• Emata (Uganda): the first digital agricultural bank in Africa, Emata provides farmers with affordable loans by utilising end-to-end digital processes, data-backed risk analytics, and a mobile-based distribution model

• Pezesha (Kenya): a holistic digital financial marketplace, Pezesha has built a proprietary credit scoring as a service infrastructure that provides a fully automated credit decisioning that is consistent, reliable and accurate for low-income customers with no credit histories;

• Plendify (Ghana): dedicated to lending working capital to businesses, Plendify uses an automated credit adjudication algorithm that is supported by machine learning and AI

• SuperFluid Labs (Kenya): a data analytics firm, SuperFluid delivers proprietary platforms for digital lending, credit scoring module development, business intelligence and consumer scoring platforms powered by data analytics and AI.

Prizes will depend on the maturity of the winning solution. For early-stage ideas, ENGIE is offering US$5,000 in cash funding to help to finance a prototype, or, for more developed solutions, it is offering a testing phase with ENGIE Africa.

The winner of the challenge will be able to test the efficiency and viability of their solution in the relevant environment within the ENGIE Africa business framework over a period of six months.

Based on the results of the testing phase, the solution shall be integrated within the ENGIE Africa business portfolio for further co-development of the project. Prospective locations for the testing phase are South Africa, Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Ivory Coast, Morocco, Tanzania and Benin.