The story of East African fintech is built around the mobile phone. Not the smartphone, mind you, but the humble feature phone. In markets where all but the most significant of locations lacked an established infrastructure of landlines and local bank branches, these phones leapfrogged both: powered by pre-paid sim cards that often served as a secondary currency and cleverly leveraged USSD technologies. But it has been seventeen years since M-PESA arrived on the scenes and yet traditional credit tools have often failed to cross the floor - in Uganda, the credit bureaus are filled with the data of there are just 2.4 million traditionally banked consumers, while a further 14 million sit waiting, with their data-rich mobile banking histories all but ignored.

But no more. In today's epsidoe I'm speaking to Charles Wandia of gnuGRID who, with Airtel, have built a national-level mobile credit score.

gnuGRID is the first and only indigenous credit reference bureau in Uganda, enabling financial inclusion through credit information sharing - and you can find them online at https://gnugridcrb.com/

You can also watch the official launch of that score at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VbEI_0l57A&t=19s

gnuGRID is also on LinkedIn, of course, as is Charles Wandia: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charles-wandia-983b4a65/

As you'll hear on the show, Charles also offers tailor-made training on credit scorecard development via Credit Tick Consulting at https://www.linkedin.com/company/credit-risk-tick-consulting/

Speaking of LinkedIn, that's where you can also find and connect with me: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendanlegrange (please do reach out, follow the show's page, and share the content with your networks)

Meanwhile, my action-adventure novels are on Amazon, some versions even for free, and my work with ConfirmU and our gamified psychometric scores is discussed at https://confirmu.com/ and on episode 24 of this show https://www.howtolendmoneytostrangers.show/episodes/episode-24

If you have any feedback or questions, or if you would like to participate in the show, please feel free to reach out to me via the contact page on this site.

Keep well, Brendan

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