Microfinance entrepreneur Dave Van Niekerk thinks Afraica is a safe bet and is lending the money to prove it - even though his customers don't have bank account between them.
Feeling Blue?
Blue Financial Services (www.blue.co.za) began life in 2001 as a finance provider for low-income earners in South Africa unable to afford mainstream financial services. By 2003 it had expanded into Botswana and by the year ending February 2005 it saw turnover reach R80 million ($11m). A swift listing on tha Altx board of the JSE in October 2006 and capital injections from AIG and IFC among others sponsored an ambitious expansion programme that sees it now operating 173 branches across Soth Africa, Botswana, Zambia, Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi, Lesotho, Namibia and Kenya, employing over 1,000 people.
David Van Niekerk founded Blue Financial Services in 2001 and has led it since as CEO. He has worked in microfinance since 1997 when he joined Unity Financial Services, later becoming a shareholder and the operational manager. Unity was eventually sold to Theta investments to become part of its microfinance stable, which was then merged into South African loans provider African Bank, to become African Bank Investments Limited. Van Niekerk held various senior management posts there until leaving for Blue. He was officially to Blue's board in October 2005.
Q. Why does your company Blue focus on microfinance for the bottom of the pyramid?
The opportunities in the microfinance area across the continent are just enormous - banks are simply not servicing this market. In Zambia for instance, you can’t get a home improvement loan or even a loan to buy a vehicle from a commercial bank - the restrictions and costs are too high.
The majority of our customers live on a subsistence living, and they don’t have a large savings base. Many of them don’t have any savings, they live from hand to mouth, so the smallest emergency expense will set them back dramatically and they need to have access to capital to fix the problem.
Q. How successful has the venture been so far?
We’re currently the top-listed company on the ALTX, with a market capitalisation of about two billion rand (U S$281m). We have strong international shareholders like IFC, part of the World Bank; AIG, one of the largest insurers in the world; Stanlib from South Africa, and the Dutch Development Bank recently also placed funding with us. We have a nice investor base, and a lot of international flavour.
We want to become Africa’s biggest credit provider, and our intention is to be in the majority of African countries in the next five years. We’ll go where others fear to tread. Our Kenyan operation is continuing despite the political chaos and will continue, and the people that pull out now are the ones that are going to get hurt.
Q. What financial services do people in this market need?
People primarily need day-to-day finance - they need salary advances, which is instant finance. Second, they need term loans, which are essentially personal loans that can be used for a variety of purposes from home improvement to an emergency. Our third most popular product is the home improvement loan. In our experience the majority of our clients don’t want loans or advances paid into a bank account, they want to receive cash.
It’s not as easy as dealing with a high-profile customer: it’s a more labour-intensive market. We spend, on average, half an hour with each customer to get things done and we pay out advances or credit on average within an hour. People need access to credit in a hurry - they’ve got jobs they’ve got to maintain, and they don’t want to go and apply and then come back for an answer three weeks later. They will often travel large distances from rural to urban areas to get finance.
We give typically home loans of up to 350,000 rand ($49,000) - an area where the banks won’t play. We’ll give education loans, home improvement loans and normal personal loans, and advanced credit with fixed repayments over time.
Q. Why don’t the banks serve these customers?
The banks are not geared for this market. It’s not their fault they’re not geared, it’s a very tough market and there isn’t necessarily all the information to hand to grant credit.
Most of this population is also unbanked. So, if you’re a bank, you’re looking at banking that person first, to get them a track record, and a history to be able to grant the credit on. Banks look at this market from a very different perspective - we don’t measure our customers’ credit ability or credit worthiness from his bank account, we look at a number of factors. Banks like to have a customer with them before they will grant credit. So you first have to bank the population - it’s a chicken and egg situation, do you bank them first or lend to them first? In Tanzania, 35% of civil servants don’t have bank accounts. They get paid by collecting cheques from banks assigned by the government, but they don’t have an account there. These are civil servants, your more educated, higher level employees - it just illustrates the limited nature of banking in Africa.
Q. What can microfinance do for economic growth in Africa?
There are many stats showing that if you lift the GDP of a country by 10%, you raise the bottom income earners by 3% - you’ve taken 3% of the population out of poverty. How do you do that? You create employment, you give potential entrepreneurs access to funding.
In Zambia, most of our customers are existing civil servants who run a small business on the sideline; where they have agricultural crops, they have a poultry business, they do repair work, and they do it through loans they get from us. We have one lady there who borrowed money from us to start a chicken business. Over a year that has blossomed and she now makes three times her teacher’s salary through her business. That’s the kind of access to finance that people require.
Q. Africa’s low-income market is perceived to be credit-risky - would you agree?
In our experience, people who have new access to credit don’t want to disappoint the lender because they’ll never be able to borrow from you again, and they want to continue that relationship. So, we have a much better payment history in the rest of sub-Saharan Africa than we do in South Africa, and strangely enough the more informal or rural the country, the better the payment culture.
It’s essentially about responsible lending - the customer has to be able to afford the instalment, so you adjust the term, the period and the value of the advance to the use of the loan to ensure they can afford it. We match the term of the repayment to the product - we won’t give somebody a school fee loan over three years, it must be a one-year loan.
Q. How do you check the creditworthiness of your customers?
We have a scoring model that we use to determine the customer’s affordability and whether he should get the loan, and that involves working with ITC bureaux and credit bureaux in these countries, often using data shared between banks and financial institutions. We base our model on factors such as length of employment, how much the customer earns, how long he has lived at the current address, and a number of different aspects of his personal life.
Q. Do you back up your loans with money management support or mentoring?
We’ve only now moved into SMME lending - small business loans - and yes, we do. There is a lot of hand-holding involved; we give the person coaching, mentoring, we manage his bank account with him for the first few months.
We’ve got education courses for our customers and education booklets to train people on budgeting, managing their money, how to use a loan, why not to use a loan, how to repay a loan, what the effects of interest rates are. This is all designed to educate our customer base, because for many this is their first experience of credit. When we opened in Malawi we were the first formal microfinancier in the market, as they had only previously had loan sharks who would break their kneecaps. They knocked us over - we couldn’t keep up with demand for the first few weeks. It’s a big education process.
Original Article: Africa Investor
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