Over an eight month period from May to December 2020 we pilot tested our app with Centenary bank and Agri-SME customers. Customers varied from small holder farmers to small and medium sized enterprises involved in production or processing of agriculture value chains for matoke, cassava, grains, oil crops, coffee, dairy, poultry and other livestock. By the end of the test we have refined our App to a fully functional Alpha version now ready for our bank clients.
We tested our App with sixty four agriculture SMEs in Uganda from May to December 2020. Of these 81% had submitted loan requests through the App. High interest rate of 24% was the reason given for not submitting loans.
Most of the loans were small under five million UGX or US$1,400 while only 8% of the loan requests were above thirty million UGX (approx $8,000) though it was the larger loans that made up around half of the total loan value of US$ 128,514 as shown in the graphs below.
At the end of the pilot 81% of our test clients wanted to continue using the App as shown in the graph below.
Deployment of a minimum viable App version in May was tested with our pilot clients. During the test period further enhancements were released based on user feedback.
A fully functional ‘Alpha’ version included new functions for direct ‘Chat’ between bank and customers and ‘Networking’ via WhatsApp groups between customers, as well as automated registration of SMEs from the App, was available in early October. Responding to further bank feedback we included in our final release in December a fast track to submit loans and a new field for bank customers to indicate their preferred branch to assist the bank allocate loan officers to customers as well as shortcuts for entry of KYC data.