Tapping the Power of Vernacular Microfinance Apps

Digital technology has the potential to help microfinance institutes become more effective and efficient. In today’s digital world, carrying a laptop in the field has become a passé, and the in-thing is to carry whatever you need in your mobile. There are mobile apps that can help loan officers of these companies working in the field maintain their data and help them operate efficiently.

Microfinance companies play a huge role in funding needs of low income population, who do not have access to the banking services. By their very definition, these companies target the customers at the micro level.

This connection is not faceless, however, as it is in the banking sector where there is often a pre-decided check list of documents required for processing any loan application. You approach the loan officer, submit the required documents related to your paying abilities and the loan needs. The system feeds your details into a software module that decides whether you are a safe borrower or not, and comes out with a credit score to assess the risk involved in bank extending credit to you. The repayment of the loan is also more or less automated and every month, a fixed amount goes out of your bank account towards repayment of the loan.

In a microfinance institution, this interaction is at a very personal level. The decision to sanction the loan depends on a lot of factors that are often not clearly defined or articulated by the head offices, because ground realities at the rural level among the low income group are vastly different from the scenario of a typical small or middle income borrower from a regular banking institution. The loan officers often have to create an emotional connection with their borrowers before loan reaching maturity, because they get to know about borrowers’ personal life as well as family and they also demonstrate affection in different ways as a part of their strategy to generate pressure or facilitate recovery.

In such a scenario, it is not difficult to see why the loan officer in a microfinance company has to be a local man or woman, speaking the language of the people he or she is interacting with and conversant with the socio-economic milieu of the area of their operation. It is also important from the point of view of cutting cost as most microfinance companies do not have much scope for overhead expenses and they often try to minimize their cost on this account. Hiring someone from local area is definitely much less expensive than cost involved in retaining an English speaking field executive from urban setting.

It is precisely this reason that makes the digital inclusion in microfinance institutes a difficult task also, because these local recruits are generally not very comfortable with English language which is the main language of majority of the apps. A vernacular microfinance app that works in the local language that people of the region speak can be the best bet for someone recruited locally to cater to the needs of the village itself.

Making vernacular apps by Anant Computing has been a highly innovative move with the kind of language support it offers. It can provide support in all Indian languages, even if the operating system does not support them, and the app comes with personalized OnScreen Keyboards in all languages, and the audience gets to choose the language they prefer from the same app. A loan officer working on a mobile app with the local language displayed on the mobile screen has definitely a better chance of getting the confidence of the local population one is trying to connect with to generate business for the company.

Microfinance apps: Getting the last mile connectivity of the market

Microfinance Institutes or MFIs tap entrepreneurial resources at the lowest level of economic stratum and create opportunities for those with limited pocket size. They may have limited penny in their pocket to execute their entrepreneurial ideas, but taken together they constitute a huge market for microfinance companies through microcredit.

They empower unbanked entrepreneurs with adequate funding and enable them to grow their business. In the last decade, the industry has experienced a significant growth and now, it is the right time to leverage mobile technology to use it to improve their operational efficiency as well as better control over the process of selection of potential customers and loan recovery.

It has been estimated that by the end of 2016, 75% of India’s population will have a mobile phone and MFIs must explore ways to use mobile technology effectively. Mobile applications can be very helpful for microfinance institutes mainly because the potential customer base is extremely fragmented geographically and it may not be possible for the field staff to carry their laptops everywhere while approaching their existing or potential customers. The wireless capabilities of mobiles like bluetooth, GPRS/3G can be quite convenient for field officers even in the remotest corners of India. Mobile apps can streamline their operation, reduce the overall cost and can also in turn increase their reach apart from improving the quality of service.

The Microfinance industry in India is still largely paper based as far as the process of customer acquisition, loan collection system and loan disbursements are involved. This system makes the task quite tedious and also increases the overall operational cost. There is also less control over field officers who are responsible for the distribution and collection of the loan. MFIs need to rethink their traditional operating models and reevaluate their future strategy for improving their operational efficiency.

Automating the process of customer enrolment, distribution of loan and collection process, based on cutting edge, full proof and efficient mobile technology, MFI can handle large amount of data quite conveniently. It can also overcome various challenges and limitations that the sector faces in the present paper-based loan disbursement and collection process.

With India’s large base of low income group population and the increasing popularity of smart phones across all levels of socio-economic strata, there are some microfinance companies, which have already started adopting mobile apps for their smooth functioning. However, one of the greatest challenges that MFIs face is in this regard is to have an app that is compatible across all kinds of phones and all OS.

There are a few companies, such as Anant Computing, which are addressing this very issue in the new platform the company is building to facilitate creation of mobile apps, which work on both feature phones and smartphones, work on all kinds of OS, and there is no need to upgrade the app if the operating system is upgraded. In addition, the company has also worked on the technology to make the rich apps with size less than 1/10th of usual mobile applications. With apps running smoothly even offline, and designed to run perfectly on low memory phones, these mobile apps could be the game changer for the microfinance companies in the sense that their field executives can tap and serve the market in a much better way than they used to do with a largely paper-based data system.

Digital Education: Is It Really A Panacea to All Cures?

The number of students attending schools in Indian villages is rising, but another shocking study shows that the majority of the students of class sixth in rural India cannot read even a class second text book and are unable to solve simple mathematical problems.

The statistics is a clear indicator that even though the education sector has witnessed a significant horizontal growth at the national level in the last few years, yet the access to quality education is confined only to urban and semi urban population. There are reasons for this state of affairs. The poor infrastructure, lack of committed teachers, lack of good study materials and textbooks and an extremely high students-teacher ratio are some of the main factors responsible for this state of affairs.

The issue is - how to address this problem! It’s a huge task given that it’s not easy to solve some of the basic challenges confronting this sector. Is there some out-of-the-box solution for this problem! Technology is often seen as the panacea for all the problems and this has been the focus of the policy makers in recent times for addressing development related issues in various sectors including education. The government is putting in a lot of effort to make technology-enabled schools in villages to improve the quality of education, but without a clear vision and direction, this is yet to translate into some positive and concrete results. As a result, huge amount of government fund is going down the drain.

But implementing digital education in villages has its own sets of challenges. Some of the main deterrents are poor Internet connectivity and limited exposure of technology to rural teachers given their low to average level of exposure. Language is also supposed to be a big barrier as teachers as well as students are not comfortable with English language which is the main language in the digital world.

There is probably a big opportunity waiting to be uncovered through some path-breaking innovative technology to address these basic, yet fundamental problems facing the rural spectrum. Can digital technology firms, companies involved in developing digital learning apps, mobile apps rise to the occasion to meet the challenge? Only time has the answer whether digital technology can help bridge the gap between urban and rural education, which is more of a haves and a have-nots divide.

The fluid state of mobile technology

The turn of the last millennium witnessed some real challenges. The first was the now infamous Y2K that wasn’t as bad a virus as it was projected to be, and the second was the dot com boom followed soon after by a bubble burst that shook the economy across the globe. On an equal scale is the challenge posed by the market on the mobile technology in the present decade, which unless addressed in the right perspective, has the potential to shake the global economy the same way as dot com revolution did in the late 90s.

Mobile apps have brought about a kind of revolution in the way people use digital technology. It is probably the single biggest breakthrough after internet revolution that took the world by storm about 25 years back. But the landscape for mobile apps is changing very fast in recent years. If the mobile app developing companies do not match the market expectations, it may be extremely difficult for them to survive the onslaught of market dynamics.

·         Mobile apps developers have to focus more and more on improving user experience. They have to ensure that what they develop should work seamlessly across all screen size and devices. Single app for all phones can add value to their brand.

·         App developers must adopt full proof and up-to-date measures to secure their apps infrastructure. Majority of us store important information in our phones, to which many of the apps resting in our phones have access. To keep all kinds of data and information including those relating to transactions safe, we are also willing to pay more.

·         Certain sectors such as health care institutes and banks are prone to attracting cyber criminals, and data security is extremely critical for such users. App developers have to take special care of the security concerns of vulnerable sectors.

·         There is a huge market for apps developed in vernacular languages. In a country like India, where smart phone user population is growing rapidly, there are millions of people who do not understand English. Addressing their need should be the prime concern of app development companies.

·         It’s an age of travelling light with minimum baggage. The same applies to the apps that you carry in your smart phone. People expect light apps with minimum memory space and nothing that starts eating your RAM or makes your phone slow.

These are some of the few market realities that sooner or later the companies will have to come to terms with in the rapidly changing digital landscape.

Mobile Apps: Preparing for Gen-next Offline Ecosystem

Google offering YouTube videos in offline mode in Indian market was a masterstroke. It was like touching the nerve of an average Indian user, irrespective of his social or economic status, geographical location, literacy level or age. Surprisingly, for all kinds of mobile users in India, whether in rural or urban areas, young or old, the price elasticity of demand for data usage is quite high, meaning thereby that the amount of data they use is very sensitive to the price they have to pay for it.

A large part of this high price elasticity is psychological as people tend to minimize their monthly expenditure on data plans they buy by resorting to means which are often not quite understandable. After all, a young student switching off his data on his mobile phone when he is watching a movie does not make any sense given that he does not even think twice before spending 500 bucks for a single show in the multiplex and spending another 200 on his popcorn bucket during interval. But it is also about extremely high cost of data usage vis-à-vis the hourly wages in India in comparison to many other developing countries that explains this kind of behaviour. A comparison with developed economies, on the other hand would in fact make the price of data usage in India appear prohibitively expensive.

Any app, if it has to be downloaded to make it functional, has to be downloaded online. But, how much data an app will use when it is being downloaded or when it is being used subsequently can put apps in vastly different categories, and make an app more or less attractive to a user who is sensitive about his data bill. The first differentiator is, of course the app size; a user is generally put off when the app is more than a certain size, and the size will depend on what kind of phone you are using, whether it’s a high end phone or a cheap handset with cramped memory space. And it’s a reality not worth ignoring by the app developers that a large majority of handsets have low memory space and a user might get put off by an app even of the size more than 8 to 10 MB.

The next differentiator is the data usage when the app is being run for use. There are apps that do not require internet connectivity at this stage or require connectivity for 50% of the time, so that the rest of the time, the application is running on offline internet. This is a kind of hybrid offline-online ecosystem, but it also means a trade-off has to be made between how much data needs to be stored in the handset’s memory to enable it to work to its full potential in an offline environment.

App developers who are economizing on the app size may be gaining a crucial competitive edge here. And there are companies which are addressing the size issues from a different strategy. Anant Computing Platform, for instance, works on this fundamental idea of enabling development of apps at almost one-tenth size of usual mobile applications, and they run smoothly even offline. They facilitate development of apps that run perfectly on low memory space phones.

The gen-next phones are most likely going to be offline primarily, and it’s not an over-statement at all when Rajan Anandan, Managing Director, Google India says that "India will be the world's largest offline internet market" in the context of YouTube becoming available offline in the Indian market. 

There is a great potential here for app developers who can harp on the idea of minimizing on the app size and making it as much offline as possible in a largely hybrid environment.