Solving a global problem by acting locally – this is the approach Agri-wallet has envisioned for their enormous challenge of tackling the growing food crisis. So how did they manage to get global banks, global food companies and global NGO’s interested in funding small-holder farmers? Well they came up with an idea to provide micro-finance options to small-holder farmers in Africa so they had access to better materials and equipment and hence produce more food. More food equals more sales, equals more profits. And with this vision small-holder farmers can collectively play an even bigger role in feeding the world.

So how do they intend to act ‘locally’?

Simply put – use local merchants who will sell better quality materials and equipment to small-holder farmers in their area. As small-holder farmers have better access to finance through the Agri-wallet platform they can afford better inputs. Win-win for the local economy and for the small-holder farmers.

The illustration below gives a clearer picture of the idea.

Let’s go Blockchain!

“We think that blockchain is disruptive, it can be replicated across countries without banks. We foresee many possibilities for ourselves to upscale without too much difficulties. Blockchain enables transparency and auditability in costs, but also for farmers where they can see what is going on with their produce. Although we do not see that interest that much yet, we see an increasing demand of consumers who would like to know where their products are sourced from for example.” – Sijmen de Hoogh, founder Dodore.

We decided to process all transactions and processes using the Ethereum (CTT coin) as a transaction engine. This enabled transparency for all processes and transactions – a big plus for Dodore when presenting the platform to stakeholders like the Mastercard Foundation or Dutch bank Rabobank.

Two BIG benefits for Agri-wallet farmers

Through our discussions with Dodore we learnt why small-holder farmers have financial issues. Besides not being viable for a traditional loan from a bank they also have two big problems:

1. Saving enough money from profits to reinvest in their farm
2. The amount of time between delivery of their produce and payment is long

Together with Dodore we thought of a way around these issues, making the Agri-wallet more appealing and effective for users. Additionally, it meant banks or other financiers would have more assurances of repayment of the money they have leant.

20% savings requirement

All Agri-wallet farmers enrolled on the platform were required to reinvest 20% of their profits back into their farm. This reinvestment focuses on new inputs like seeds, fertilisers or machinery.

Closed-wallet Solution

To achieve this we built a closed-wallet solution. The closed-wallet solution enabled all transactions between farmers, merchants and buyers to be handled via stable-tokens that are backed by fiat currency held in bank reserves. All transactions are then stored in a blockchain ledger. Through this method farmers were able to continually have success in their annual harvest and able to grow their farm.

Faster payment after delivery of harvest

The second big benefit for small-holder farmers was their ability to be paid quicker after delivering their harvest. Traditionally farmers would need to wait between 2-4 months to be paid for their harvest, until after the buyer had sold their produce. We found this to be a big issue and caused a lot of farmers to have cash-flow problems. Dodore therefore recommended that farmers immediately be paid using stable-tokens which they could use to buy inputs. 80% of those stable-tokens could be withdrawn into real currency using a contra-account in the country – in this case MPESA. Dodore would then collect the ‘real payment’ months later when the buyer had sold their produce. A win-win for all parties involved.

Let’s Launch!

We launched the Agri-wallet platform in Kenya together with Dodore. Initially a few hundred farmers had been registered along with merchants and buyers. The system worked exceptionally well and we found it made a huge difference for small-holder farmers in buying better inputs, producing better yields and through the Agri-wallet platform were able to get their profits faster, whilst saving 20% more to re-invest in their farm.

Agri-wallet is an international success!

After the initial launch, the team at Dodore got stuck in and quickly expanded the number of registered farmers. We had anticipated this and designed a flexible and scalable solution allowing for quick deployment across borders. Soon after the success in Kenya the Agri-wallet was introduced to multiple other countries in Africa like Rwanda and Tanzania.

Global companies take notice

Not only was the local success in Kenya noticeable – it sparked the interest of global companies like Dutch bank Rabobank, MasterCard Foundation and even the Dutch government.

Rabobank

Rabobank has a rich history in funding agricultural activities – and when they were introduced to the Agri-wallet they became interested to invest.

MasterCard Foundation

The MasterCard foundation helped to analyse the challenges and scaling opportunities for the Agri-wallet, noticing its potential as a disruptor to the market.

World Food Programme

The potential to scale food production with small-holder farmers is of great interest for the World Food Programme in its mission to feed everyone and drive out hunger.

We keep on developing

As with all good solutions you need to continually develop and update as you progress. This is the case with the Agri-wallet which has seen enormous success and recognition. Based on their needs and how they can best support small-holder farmers – we will help them develop it.

Innovation earmarked for success

Every now and then you are introduced to someone with an idea that immediately clicks and makes you say something like “Yes, it’s so obvious!”. This was the case when we first heard of COIN22 and their idea to create a platform offering risk-reduced lending and restricted finance in public funding. In 2017 blockchain had been a term most people had heard about and few understood. Yet, COIN22 knew the importance of using blockchain to ensure transparency within their ledger. Having worked in fintech solutions before at large European banks it was a great challenge to work with this scale-up. And so we started a Blockchain Project focused on earmarked financing.

To better understand their vision – we held a 3-day workshop

To best support COIN22 we focused on understanding more in-depth their vision for the solution, Where would it work? How would it work? Who will use it? and many more questions. Our Project Manager, along with our most experienced fintech developer took part in the session. Only when the scope is clear did we start work on this Blockchain Project.

Key Findings were that end-users who would gain access to financing would probably operate from low mobile coverage areas. End-users would most likely not have access to smartphones and so the most logical form of communication as well as transactional communication would be via SMS messages. This gave us some excellent insights into the kind of use cases and real-world application the solution would have. However, this was an important first step as it started giving us a clearer picture about the infrastructure and which components were needed.

We further identified a host of necessary features and requirements.

Web based management panel:

A management portal enabling monitoring, control and maintenance of the platform.

Ethereum blockchain based ledger:

An Ethereum blockchain based ledger to allow for all transactions to be recorded with minimised opportunity for tampering, enabling transparency – which was a key selling point for the investors of COIN22.

Merchants web portal:

Merchants who would be able to sell their products and services via the platform to those who applied for micro-financing.

Customer account portal:

Portal to manage customer accounts. This was especially important for those who operate using ‘dumb’ phones and only send requests via SMS messages.

GDPR compliant:

Although it was clear the solution would be deployed and used globally, it was decided to enforce GDPR compliancy practices to ensure a solid level of data security and management.

SMS gateway for transactions:

With SMS forming a key component of communication and transactional traffic, a reliable gateway to SMS traffic was required.

Flexible to add new features in the future:

The platform was to be designed to have a robust but flexible infrastructure so new features could be added in the future.

Now comes the Challenging part!

After the initial workshop and identifying the ideas, requirements and functionalities we came to the challenging part – overcoming the challenges!

We realised we will be the ideation partner in this project – helping COIN22 build their ideas based on available technologies and software. To be fair this role suited us well having done this previously for companies like DEKRA, AON and others.

Working in low to no internet connection environments isn’t new as we have done such projects before for organisations like WorldVision – however it is always a challenge to help the customer translate ideas and features into these low-to-no internet environments.

As with all fintech solutions – we had to consider the compliancy and data management of end-customers. Trust that your data is securely and efficiently handled is key to building a trustworthy brand name.

The final big challenge we faced was the solution architecture which needed to function partly on- and offline, allow for continual development and integrate different components like Ethereum blockchain, SMS gateway and different web-portals.

Time to develop a Blockchain Project!

After we worked through the challenges we started with a Minimum Viable Product or MVP Blockchain Project. This allowed COIN22 to demonstrate their idea via a working software solution to investors, stakeholders and most importantly their targeted end-customers. Via Agile methodology we stayed in close contact, updating after each round of development. You can learn more on how we did this here.

Time to Launch and go BIG!

After MVP stage we further defined the scope of the Blockchain Project, expanded the features and started working with COIN22 to develop the solution to meet their vision. After 4 months we were ready to launch the solution to the production environment and make some real world solid impacts!

Since that first launch we have done multiple updates, added new features and expanded the platform according to the ideas that the team at COIN22 have. We continue today to play a role in ideation, development and maintenance of the COIN22 platform.

You need to innovate to survive

This is very much the case in Germany where we know that 25,000 bank branches are making a loss and need to close. The hard part is deciding how to continue servicing your customers when your bank office is closed (or downscaled)? This is where you need to be innovative – and this is where Tellma GmbH is innovative. They saw the gap and wanted to provide a full software & hardware Video Kiosk Terminal Solution to banks that need to innovate to survive.

Their customers – financial service providers – have a need to perform all banking use cases via a Video Kiosk Terminal Solution.

So where did we start?

Well to begin we sat down with Tellma and discussed their idea. We identified that they need not just a development agency but a partner who is invested in the software also delivering, because if it delivers Tellma wins more deals and we can grow our software presence. With this in mind we started on developing a basic or ‘MVP’ (Minimal viable product) version of the solution.

Time to innovate

Having worked in the financial service industry before with banks like Raiffeisen we understood that when innovating there always is a bottom-line. And the bottom-line always is what are my financial gains? This formed the starting block of the solution we would build together with Tellma. The end-customer being financial service providers – need to know what is their financial gain from a Video Kiosk Terminal Solution? To that end we started identifying the highest gain use cases which could benefit from video kiosk banking. These included:

• Account Management
• Mortgage & Loans
• Activating new cards
• Depositing
• Investment Advice
• Wealth management

This also meant we identified our first challenges of the project..

When identifying that we needed components like a identification we started seeing that the solution would comprise of different third-party solutions like VideoID. It meant our first challenge was to design an infrastructure that was both quickly deployable to different environments whilst being able to integrate via API with multiple third-party solutions. Our awesome video development team huddled together and thought it through, with success!

The eventual solution allows for rapid deployment of the Video Kiosk Terminal Solution to multiple environments using Docker technology.

Challenges lead to new Features

After the Video Kiosk Terminal Solution was defined, we continued on and identified that bank agents should be able to monitor and control the physical environment the kiosk is located in. A clear example was when discussing your bank business using a kiosk you would like to have the location close the door so others cannot hear what you are discussing. As in many industries, but most prevalent in the financial services industry – if the solution is not customer friendly, users won’t want to use it. With this in mind we therefore developed an agent workstation so that bank employees could control everything from air-conditioning or heating to opening or closing the kiosk door. It made for a much more pleasant customer experience which was reflected in the results (see below).

Know Your Customer

For unique features like video identification we needed to integrate the solution via REST API with third-party solutions. Features like these are crucial in the Know Your Customer (KYC) practices every financial service provider goes through. We therefore scanned the market for effective solutions which had a strong API available and tested them extensively. We eventually came to a provider whom we use today and is used by various German and Swiss banks to identify and validate their customer is who they say they are.

So what are my financial gains?

We kept coming back to this question throughout development of the software solution. We know we had the use cases hammered down, the KYC aspect covered but we also know that in the financial service provider sector there is always that question: what are my financial gains? With our state-of-the-art agent workstation centralising bank employee resources, banks could drive down costs in low-turnover bank offices. Reducing their physical space meant reducing costs, whilst maximising their human resources.

But we are still not done..

Software solutions in the financial services sector are prone to extreme scrutiny when it comes to data management, security and compliancy. Using our great in-house testers, as well as an external company tested our solutions with results in-line with ISO27001 standards. We took it a step further and passed for the ISAE3402 penetration testing, often required by banking organisations. Steps like these we had seen were necessary for clients like Raiffeisen and so we were well prepared to do it again for German and Swiss banks.

Final touches make the difference!

The kiosk solution has been running since 2017 and we have made major upgrades with new features and functionalities since then. We work closely with Tellma in deciding which components to add and to upgrade. Features like custom advertisement on kiosk screens when not in use, or full branding of both hardware and software. We keep making improvements to the solution with the original goal in mind: if it delivers Tellma wins more deals and we can grow our software presence.

Solid solutions deserve solid support

As a partner to Tellma it is understandable that the video kiosk software requires custom and unique support. Our custom SLA for Tellma has been in place for years and we are glad we can help them with a solid software solution for the truly top leader they have become in their market.