5 African credit scoring startups to participate in the ENGIE challenge

French energy company, ENGIE, is holding a challenge at the Africa Tech Summit, that would see credit scoring startups pitch for a chance to test their solutions with the utility company.

ENGIE is a primary sponsor for the Africa Tech Summit which is set to take place for the third time in Kigali-Rwanda in February.

Successful credit scoring startups will be able to test their innovative solutions on ENGIE’s existing and future customers.

Startups participating in the ENGIE Challenge are expected to provide “proper, accurate, efficient and relevant business intelligence, 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.”

Here are the 5 startups selected to pitch at ENGIE Challenge:

1. Pezesha (Kenya): Pezesha is a holistic digital financial marketplace. It 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.
2. CARMA (Kenya): generation 2.0 of credit bureaus, built on a decentralised basis, CARMA facilitates data exchange directly between lending companies.
3. Superfluid Labs (Kenya): Superfluid Labs is a data analytics firm which delivers proprietary platforms for digital lending, credit scoring module development, business intelligence and consumer scoring platforms powered by data analytics and AI.
4. Emata (Uganda): As Africa’s first digital agricultural bank, it provides farmers with affordable credit by utilising end-to-end digital processes, data-backed risk analytics and a mobile-based distribution model.
5. Plendify (Ghana): Plendify lends working capital to businesses using an automated AI-powered credit adjudication algorithm.

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Winning ideas’ prizes will depend on their maturity.

For early stage ideas: ENGIE will offer US$ 5,000 in cash to finance a working prototype.

More mature solutions will be allowed the opportunity to test the viability of their solution with ENGIE’s Africa-based customers for six months.

Should the testing phase go well, the winning solution will be integrated into ENGIE Africa’s business portfolio to further develop their solution in partnership with the company.

The testing phase is most likely to be conducted in either of these countries: Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda, Rwanda, Ivory Coast, Morocco, Tanzania and Benin.