Colendi is a multifunctional banking as a service platform that democratizes banking services for consumers, merchants, and financial institutions to overcome the limitations associated with legacy banking. Colendi is moving forward with the goal of solving a chronic financial problem that directly affects more than three billion people who do not have bank accounts and more than five billion people who cannot get loans. Colendi develops unique services based on scoring algorithms, combining new generation financial technology solutions utilizing artificial intelligence and big data. Together with its platform partners and strategic business allies, Colendi provides fast and easy access to loans with buy-now-pay-later model as well as other distinct financial services to 7M users as of today. By increasing users' literacy level, Colendi helps them save through micro-investment platforms.

Colendi

This by full stack web developer Abbey Perini makes some interesting points about the stigma and biases found in software development. Indeed, women have had a hand in computer science since the very start, and the lack of support and facilities to encourage further interaction can be hard to understand. Hackernoon post Abbey points out how she loved learning to code and coding in private. When she took her skills public and started networking, she had to deal with a lot of unjustified stereotypical criticism as well as major biases against her inherent skills. Her interviewers and co-workers continually made reference to her gender as opposed to the quality of coding. This can be quite toxic and runs counter to true gender equality. In Abbey’s case, the problem is not computer science, but the irrational biases surrounding the computer science and Web3. business of Women Already Play a Huge Role In Web3 There are already a number of women who are heavily involved in cryptocurrency, and have been since the beginning. Take , the CEO and co-founder of Lightning Labs, serial entrepreneur, and lecturer at Yale University. This startup developed and implemented the Lightning Network Daemon and protocol. Stark is also a researcher at Coin Center and holds a Juris Doctor degree from Harvard. Elizabeth Stark Meanwhile, is the founder of the female-led data analytics provider, which assists traders and investors to make informed decisions about their financial allocations. The application supports those who are just starting out in cryptocurrency and also caters to institutions and trading professionals. Essentially, it aggregates multiple relevant data points into a format that people can understand, and then apply, to their trades. Imge Su Cetin Defy Trends The Defy Trends team seeks to help people escape from the outdated banking system by making informed decisions on crypto investment. Before founding this company, Imge Su worked as a Data Analyst at the International Organization of Migration and as a research analyst for the United Nations in Iraq. She holds a BS in economics and has a master's in data science. , founded by Elizabeth Rossiello, is a payments and exchange platform for emerging countries. Rossiello was selected as a member of the Investment Committee for Bamboo Capital and the Future Council of the World Economic Forum on Blockchain. Colendi, a decentralized credit scoring system, was founded by Mihriban Ersin Tekmen. Colendi is aiming to support microfinance and to bank the unbanked. BitPesa Other hugely influential figures in the blockchain space include Sally Eaves, Galia Benartzi, Rachael Wolfson, Piper Moretti, and Maxine Ryan. While there are some prominent contributors, however, the trend is that its more difficult for women to succeed in Web3 due to historical biases that hinder the rate of progress. The Importance Of Actual, Not Feigned, Equality There are very serious reasons as to why more women are needed in Web3, and this goes beyond mere virtue signaling or political diversity mandates (where companies employ a few staff to appear diverse). Why pretend to be an all-inclusive company if you’re not going to make it a real part of the culture? to be diverse and diverse are two completely different things. Actual diversity is needed in Web3, particularly in the supporting areas of finance and business which are known to be in terms of financial allocations. Appearing actually being very imbalanced The problem gets deeper when you consider the future of the global economy. It’s obvious that programmers of AI and decentralized applications are going to hold enormous power. If the vast majority of computer scientists and researchers are going to be male, what are the implications for a society founded on distributed ledgers? The biases are going to be reflected in the code. The core ethos of distributed ledgers is equality for all parties, based on competence and interest. An unfair representation of one side goes against the very principles of blockchain. From a commercial standpoint, there are also very precise reasons why equality and diversity will increase success. A significant amount of objective research points out that diverse teams work more effectively. Failing to attract a diverse number of software developers into Web3 will have dire implications for the future economy - which will be built on distributed ledgers and smart contracts. The issue needs to be given increased weight and be organically implemented. Assisting Women To Gain Access To Web3 There are many strategies that could be adopted to help increase equality in Web3. But social stigma is very difficult to pin down. Female programmers, especially teenagers and college students, will be very influenced by the prevailing social norms, which are generally not supportive of their interest in computer science and related areas. The largest culprit is fundraising and business, which has long been male-dominated (as evidenced by a huge body of ). This is an area where women are clearly discriminated against and they simply don’t get as much backing in comparison. Obviously, the ability to get finance is critical to the long-term viability of any business. Educational and business incentives are needed. reliable research Admittedly, it is definitely possible to go too far in the other direction. Hiring somebody as a diversity hire as opposed to the quality of their work is an incredibly insulting thing to do and can be quite dehumanizing. It’s about equality of opportunity. From a financial and educational standpoint, the opportunities need to be equal. The cultural and social perspectives are the most deeply ingrained and the most difficult to tackle. Even with tangible incentives and programs, these will take time to transform. They’ve Been Here All Along Women have played, and are playing, a pivotal role in Web3. It is undoubtedly very difficult to battle against the stigma as either a Web3 founder or a blockchain programmer. Faruk Ates, in a Hackernoon post about the , went as far as to suggest that: history of women in computing “Women invented the field - then men pushed them out of it”. While the gender disparity is evident, distributed ledger technology ultimately lends itself towards fairness and will help to assist in actual, as opposed to feigned, equality. Everybody will benefit from diversity through a stronger ecosystem built on sounder principles of unity, as opposed to exclusion. This includes both males and females.

Women in Web3: Defeating The Stigma and Pointing Out The Benefits

As blockchain and cryptocurrency become a new front in financial industry innovation, women have joined, as founders of many prominent projects that are creating new opportunities.
While the base of the blockchain industry has been in place for more than a decade, numerous areas remained underdeveloped. Many areas in blockchain and cryptocurrency can benefit from new ideas and trained professionals that are applying their experience from other areas to the growing decentralized ecosystem. Women-led Crypto Projects Here are some of the women-led crypto projects that are making a difference today – and offering people all over the world new tools that are highly useful. 1. Lightning Labs The co-founder and CEO of , Elizabeth Stark, is also an educator, lecturer at Yale University, and entrepreneur. She saw an opportunity to improve on blockchain and worked to make Lighting Labs a reality. Lightning Labs Founded in 2016 and headquartered in San Francisco, California, Lightning Labs is a technology startup that developed a level two open protocol layer that leverages blockchain and smart contracts to make transactions cheaper and faster. Not only does this help with blockchain scalability, but it also opens up Bitcoin transactions to new markets that need low-cost transactions. The startup developed the Lightning Network Daemon and implemented the developer-friendly Lightning Network protocol. With the goal of bringing a system based on cryptography to market, Lightning Labs connects the world of open-source software with Bitcoin and next-generation fintech ideas. While these ideas may have seemed limited in utility, now that nations like El Salvador are using Bitcoin as a national currency, platforms like Lightning Network may lead the way into a new world of low-cost decentralized transactions. 2. Defy Trends is bringing advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) analytics to the cryptocurrency investing space. It offers investors of every stripe a way to successfully invest in cryptos, without loads of research and analysis. Defy Trends The team behind the platform wants to include anyone who is curious about escaping what they call the “outdated, centralized financial system.” In order to help investors achieve success in the crypto markets, it has created an easy-to-understand User Interface (UI) that is the front end of an advanced analytics platform that both delivers real-time data and advanced predictive tools. DeFy Trends is also focused on education and allows people to fully understand why cryptos are different from the financial system they are replacing. The team at DeFy is led by co-founder Imge Su Cetin, who is an experienced data scientist. The company also features women like its CFO Elena Garidis, who worked at JP Morgan Chase international Private Bank. 3. Colendi Mihriban Ersin Tekmen is the co-founder and COO at – a company that is using blockchain to make the fintech space better. Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Switzerland, Colendi is a decentralized credit scoring platform using blockchain technology to provide a secure and democratic service to fintech firms everywhere. Colendi Colendi enables the development of financial applications for unbanked individuals as well as the development of credibility assessment. Microcredit, installment procurement, P2P financing, and reliability testing are all made easier with the tools the company developed. More apps and systems will be built on top of the Colendi protocol. It has the potential to help hundreds of millions of people globally who are shut out of the legacy financial system. Colendi's goal is to support the world's unbanked citizens to achieve a more inclusive position in the field of microfinance. As one of the few women holding C-level positions in the blockchain industry, Mihriban is an advocate for women in the tech sector. Mihriban is also the co-founder of Fintechtime, an independent publication that provides the latest news and analysis on the world fintech market, which she sees as helpful to people who have been marginalized by a financial system that isn't universally accessible. 4. BitPesa Elizabeth Rossiello is the Founder and CEO of , a Payments and Foreign Exchange platform for Emerging Markets using blockchain and Bitcoin. Established in 2013, it was the first company to connect Bitcoin to mobile money platforms in African nations. BitPesa The startup developed a digital currency payment platform that accepts Bitcoin payments, exchanges bitcoins for local currency, and sends funds to a bank account or mobile wallet. Rossiello has expanded the company’s influence from its roots in Nairobi, Kenya across Africa and Europe. In addition, she was selected as a member of the Investment Committee for Bamboo Capital and the Future Council of the World Economic Forum on Blockchain. Bitcoin can make an outsized impact anywhere banking services are limited – and BitPesa has proved how popular it is in emerging markets. The Beginning of a New Financial System According to research by CoinMarketCap, while the blockchain industry is dominated by men, the number of women working in crypto has increased by 43 percent last year. These women-owned projects are making a big impact in the blockchain and crypto world, and paving the way to motivate other females to become a part of the global, decentralized community. Just because the number of women in tech-related fields is significantly lower than that of men doesn't mean things will always continue to be the same way in the future. As a novel technology, blockchain will impact many other industries in the coming years and women will play an important role in this revolution. On the other hand, the blockchain industry also has the potential to give women financial independence and freedom while advancing their business goals. No one can deny that the success of these women is a positive sign for the future with the development of further technology projects in the works. Disclaimer: The opinions in this article belong to the author alone and should not be considered investment advice. Lead Image Courtesy of Ryan Jacobson at unsplash.com

4 Women-led Crypto Projects That Are Driving the Blockchain Industry

So far 2020, has been a truly magnificent year for Decentralized Finance (DeFi). Since the beginning of the year, the total value locked in DeFi smart contracts has risen fivefold, with the vast majority of this growth coming from the last two months alone. This was also marked by the emergence and explosive growth of new hopeful DeFi platforms, such as Compound and yearn.finance. However, there is still a long road ahead for DeFi to become a veritable alternative to traditional finance and one of the most pressing pain points right now is underwriting. In classical finance, taking out a loan means that you go to a bank, the bank assesses the probability of you being able to pay back the loan, and if the bank deems you creditworthy, you get your loan instantly, often without any collateral. With DeFi, it is not the same. When you want to take out a loan, you have to provide a much larger amount of money as collateral than the amount you are getting. Now, this does make sense if you take out a loan on an illiquid asset, for example, if you take out a mortgage on your house. Suppose you need some money to bridge over a minor financial emergency. Sure, you could sell your house and use the revenue to pay your bills, but most of us would prefer to keep living in our own house. Instead, you can easily use your house as collateral to get a credit line from your bank. In contrast, cryptocurrencies are highly liquid assets, so there is no real need to take out a mortgage on your crypto holdings. Furthermore, there are instances where you need cash for spending, but you don’t want to liquidate your crypto because you expect the price of your assets to rise. However, you are not really taking out a loan in the classical sense with DeFi, since you have to put down more capital as collateral than you are taking out, thereby increasing your risk exposure. This is more akin to taking out a leveraged position than a loan. In fact, you are likely better off simply selling a share of your holdings and then taking out a leveraged position through either margin trading or perpetual contracts, since this is usually cheaper and liquidation risks can be estimated more easily. In order to move forward and become attractive to a wider audience, DeFi must take this important step and make real underwriting possible. Here are three promising developments on the road to underwriting in DeFi. Identity Naturally, when you lend money and take on the risk that your counterparty defaults on their debts, you want to know the identity of your counterparty. With DeFi, borrowers could be literally anyone. This can only work since as a lender, that counterparty risk is mitigated by the fact that the loan is overcollateralized. In order to enable underwriting, however, it is absolutely necessary to determine the borrower’s identity. Otherwise, the borrower could easily refuse to pay back their debt and get away with it. When you know the identity of your counterparty, you can take legal action against them, which could result in the worst-case of personal insolvency for the borrower. While this may sound cruel and coldhearted, these steps are required to ensure credit discipline. With DeFi as it currently exists, there is no possible way to engage in litigation against a tardy borrower. Also, there is no such thing as personal insolvency or a bad credit rating in blockchain-based systems, as people can always generate a new private key and start over with a blank slate. The bare minimum that is needed in order to make underwriting in DeFi possible is to have some kind of reputation system that is linked to each user’s real-world identity. Luckily, there are projects such as that work on establishing an identity layer for blockchain users. Shyft This has multiple use cases, such as user identification and authentication system for online services and a hard identification system for governmental interactions, or services that require KYC. With blockchain-based identity management solutions, users get full control over whom their personal data is shared with, in contrast to centralized authentication systems such as Google’s. Shyft also establishes a reputation system based around their Relational Merit Token, which users earn for various activities, such as associating their blockchain address with KYC data and positive interactions with other attested Shyft users and other network nodes. Just as easily, Shyft can be incorporated into DeFi platforms to identify its users and assess their creditworthiness, by looking at their past transaction and credit history across the various DeFi products. Risk Scoring The next thing we need for underwriting is a scoring system that assesses a potential borrower’s creditworthiness and, by proxy, their default risk. This is very similar to the credit score you know from classical lending, but mapping this to the blockchain environment has proven to be difficult. Likely the easiest way to add your credit score to your blockchain identity is to simply link it with your traditional credit score through a credit bureau. However, the real innovation would be to infer a credit rating from your DeFi history or some other data. For example, is a microcredit platform that uses machine learning to establish a risk score from over 1000 personalized data points, gathered from a user’s behavior on the platform, the user’s smartphone, social media, purchase history, and other factors. Colendi Thanks to this automated credit scoring without the requirement of prior credit history, it will become possible for the over 1.7 billion unbanked people around the world to apply for a loan and establish a credit history in the same breath. If systems like Colendi prove to be successful, they might become a basis for DeFi credit scoring as well. On a similar note, the credit rating agency Morningstar by rating debt tokens, which are often issued by companies through security token offerings. plans to move into the blockchain sector While this only provides credit ratings for companies at the moment, this approach could become another part of the puzzle for DeFi, especially when paired with personal identities and their prior credit history. Decentralized Insurance Right now, the closest things we have in the DeFi sector to underwriting are the relatively few projects that work on decentralized insurance. This already involves a certain element of underwriting but in a strictly controlled environment. For example, is a project that is working on several DeFi insurance products, such as insurance against hurricanes, droughts, or floods. Etherisc Their first product that is already live is a decentralized flight delay insurance. This works because it is relatively easy to estimate the risks that a flight will be delayed and data on flight delays are readily available. In order to insure yourself, you pay a premium in Ether and when your flight is indeed delayed, you get an instant payout in Ether as well. Another insurance project that aims to tackle a much harder problem is with its smart contract coverage. Users of the platform can insure themselves against losses incurred as a result of smart contract hacks. Nexus Mutual The pricing of the policy is largely determined by risk assessors who stake their NXM tokens, thereby vouching for the security of the covered smart contract. Finally, should be mentioned in this context. This platform allows anyone to create prediction markets on just about any subject. In theory, it is entirely possible to ask the market how likely a certain debtor is to default, thus getting both a market estimate and an opportunity to hedge against this case. Augur Currently, this does not look like a viable option for retail DeFi borrowers, since these markets likely wouldn’t be very attractive. For large debtors, such as debt token issuers, it might however be possible to ask how high is the risk that the debtor will default. Conclusion Right now, decentralized loans are the killer application for DeFi, as this is the use case for the two most high-ranking DeFi platforms, Maker and Compound. Together, they make up for almost 50% of all the value locked in DeFi alone. With that said, lending will not be very useful for most people without proper underwriting. Making this a reality is quite possibly the holy grail of DeFi and any platform that finds a satisfactory solution to the underwriting problem will surely become the highest-ranked DeFi platform by value locked in the platform. There is however a long way to go until we get there and it will most certainly be a puzzle with many pieces. The first thing that is needed is to establish an identity layer on the blockchain. This is necessary in order to ensure borrowers follow up on their debt, as well as rejecting unreliable borrowers while making discounts for disciplined borrowers possible. Secondly, these identities must be linked with some sort of credit score in order to assess the risks involved with lending to a specific person. This score can be derived from traditional credit histories, histories about behavior on DeFi platforms, or other factors. The third large piece of the puzzle is risk transformation, which can be achieved through insurance or prediction markets. While we are still far away from achieving this goal, the first steps in the right direction are already underway.

The Question of Underwriting in DeFi And What's Developing On That Front

In today’s world, most of the companies and startups even those that do not have anything to do with financial services, have been increasingly taking the provision of alternative financial services to the individuals as a mission. Therefore, it would not be wrong to claim that every company will be a fintech company in the not-too-distant future. The distinguishing characteristic of the current period is the appearance of more choices, better products, and lower prices for consumers all around the world via the interplay between finance and technology sectors under the name of “fintech.” In other words, digital transformation has been for a while changing the way existing finance and banking industry operates. Over the last ten years, there have been new entrants to the banking ecosystem in the form of either competitors or enablers, and one of the main aims is to leverage innovative technologies to change the way financial services are provided to the low-income and unbanked populations. Every company will be a FinTech company! Why? Today, financial institutions are required to adapt to the fintech wave, or they have to die. The notion of adaptation is ranging from digitizing existing products and services to a complete digital transformation of processes and the introduction of new products and services. To understand the reason behind such large-scale changes in the financial ecosystem in the digital age, first, it is of paramount importance to be aware of the deficiencies in the traditional banking industry. For example, according to the survey conducted by the World Economic Forum, only of the millennial and Gen Z generations trust their banks to be fair and honest, which shows that the established banks are not successful enough to provide delightful products to their customers. 28 percent Furthermore, it is also possible to talk about a gradual reduction in investors’ confidence in the banks as a result of slowing growth in volumes and top-line revenues in the market. For example, there was only 4 percent increase in the loan growth in 2018- the lowest in the past five years and a good 150 basis points below nominal GDP growth, as can be seen in Mckinsey company report. Source: ) https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/financial-services/our-insights/global-banking-annual-review-2019-the-last-pit-stop-time-for-bold-late-cycle-moves Moreover, there has been a dramatic reduction in the global return on tangible equity (ROTE) from 20.0 percent in 2013 to 14.1 percent in 2018 because of the “digital disruption”, which shows the difficulty for the banks to strengthen their productivity and manage the risk costs. Source: ) https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/financial-services/our-insights/global-banking-annual-review-2019-the-last-pit-stop-time-for-bold-late-cycle-moves At that point, it is obvious that today, people all around the world need to get access to the alternative financial services and products, while ensuring the privacy and security of their data in the digital age. Until today, there have been fewer options, and those offerings are much more expensive. In that sense, the thorny question is as follows; Why has the status quo survived until today, despite the extreme levels of customer dissatisfaction? The answer to that question can be understood, considering the difficulty of adapting innovative technologies to existing financial services. Established financial institutions have been around for more than 100 years with a large brick and mortar retail footprint, which in turn prevents the businesses from cutting costs and introducing new products quickly. At the same time, many of these institutions have already prefer to invest their billions of dollars, and IT budgets in maintaining their existing systems, and to comply with the highly regulated industry by a wide range of regulators across state and federal, leaving almost no room for innovative product development process. The existence of compliance requirements and complex infrastructure creates both challenges and opportunities for many startups trying to enter the market, which is a paradox of today’s financial ecosystem. Nevertheless, it would be fair to be optimistic about the future without ignoring such challenges both traditional institutions and new entrants mostly face. Why should we be optimistic? When looking at ten years ago, the people trying to build a product for the market were required to go through many phases, just like buying the physical servers, software licenses, writing some codes for a database e.g. However, today, a software company can be started through only a credit card or a laptop with the help of infrastructure as a service system developed by Amazon Web Services which can bring all of these phases into one step. More importantly, this system reduces the cost and complexity of launching a software business, and of  enabling the financial services companies, which in turn unleashes thousands of experiments for the future of banking. In other words, the notion of “AWS for fintech” shows itself in the banking industry. For example, before the infrastructure as a service system, the cost of running compute and storage for a business could be around $ 150,000 for a month, yet it now costs approximately $1,500 for a month. And, as mentioned previously, today, any company can more easily and less costly start or enable financial services. In that sense, consumer apps across a wide range of categories are working as de facto banks. For example, Distributed Core Banking Platform was established through the collaboration between the Ant Financial Services and Hoperun Information Technology to offer alternative banking products to people with the help of customer-oriented business models. Such a new solution is facilitated by Business Platform as a Service product that was introduced by ANT Financial in September 2018. Through such an innovative business platform, financial institutions can take the advantage of Ant Financial’s capabilities in the areas of product and asset management, capital verification and full-link pressure tests that are combined with Hoperun’s experience in the finance industry. All of these developments sound promising. However, how can the globalization of fintech wave become possible? As we know, while B2B companies are traditionally making money by selling the products to the customers, B2C companies gain their revenues by selling advertising to customers as well as selling products. However, both B2B and B2C companies have started to implement new business models based on the white-labeling financial services with the help of rising fintech wave. For example, ride-sharing companies such as Uber joined neo-banks to provide customers with debit cards and checking accounts. Adapting the financial services to their business plans has contributed to the roadmaps of such companies in two ways. First, there was a high cost resulting from the employment of the drivers for these companies. After that, the employees were required to compensate that cost through margin on rides. However, such a compensation process has become faster through margin on banking services. At the same time, the driver is more likely to continue to work with the company because of the provided financial services. In addition to the ride-sharing companies, there have also been many other companies across multiple sectors that started to support fintech business models and infrastructure to offer specialized services to their customers. In that sense, as an attractive opportunity for investing, the infrastructure companies are highly supporting the implementing financial services for both consumers and B2B products. Considering some examples, just like Shopify, Mindbody e.g., whose almost half of their revenues are provided by the financial services such as offering websites for a monthly subscription fee to any merchant, the dimensions of the fintech explosion with the rise of “as a service infrastructure” might be understood to a certain extent. As another example, CollectAI, digital receivables management firm, puts the business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C) white-label solution for the digital payment reminders in the segments of credit cards and consumer credits, and importantly, such sophisticated solution is deployed by Hanseatic Bank, a Germany-based subsidiary of Societe Generale. Through the collaboration between the traditional bank and the fintech company, while the collection rate of the bank pointed up from previous results, the expenses of the bank for receivables management reduced. Michel Billon, CEO of Hanseatic Bank, states: “Thanks to collectAI’s solution, we have increased the efficiency of our account receivables management and optimized customer retention with higher satisfaction. Further key results were overall higher cash flow, a faster execution as well as reduced communication costs. Customer-centric collections are the key to our digital transformation strategy.” In the highly regulated banking industry, applying for a license can take years, and most of the new startups and companies have been increasingly trying to find a sponsor bank, to be a partner with the banks, and borrow a license by “open banking” innovation. However, as well as such partnership, the startups are required to get the core system, just like the large database to log where the money of their customers is, and how it is moving around. And then, it is necessary to integrate this database with a series of payment systems to enable the customers to take money out of their accounts. As we know, to provide the loans to the customers, there is a need for the borrowers’ credit history and some personal information obtained by the credit bureaus following the KYC (know your customer) process. And, because of the necessity of protecting the private data of the customers, there is also the need for more software programs. Therefore, the open banking partnership or banking as a service system has been increasingly preferred by both banks and startups because of its contribution to the KYC process and customer-centric business model. At that point, it can be said that through the “infrastructure as a service” system enabling card issuing, regulatory compliance, and money movement, financial services have been increasingly being part of almost every company’s roadmap day by day. That is to say, the way the banking industry operates is fastly changing in the digital age. As mentioned above, startups have also emerged as the actors contributing to such large-scale transformation of the financial landscape by introducing new, better, and cheaper products and lower prices for consumers. In that sense, Colendi company can also be regarded as one of these new entrants to the finance and banking industry. As a credit scoring and micro-credit platform, at the beginning, Colendi project was developed to evaluate the creditworthiness of the consumers by leveraging a wide range of data sources about users. The main goal was to provide the un/underbanked individuals with financing opportunities with the help of machine-learning-based credit scoring mechanisms that enable the Colendi company to evaluate complementary and distributed data segments of the users. In that sense, Colendi company was developed as a protocol aiming to understand the real needs and solutions of the problems the consumers mostly face. And then, the protocol has been tested in many used cases both through users and developers globally until this time. At that point, Colendi can now be called “as a service” platform whose B2B2C model aims to provide white-label solutions to any merchant, utility company or consumer company in today’s Fintech ecosystem. Today, Colendi has more than one thousand merchants in the market in Turkey and is working with more than three big companies through B2B2C white label product model with the goal of creating big scalable model for utility, telecom companies and most of the other merchants trying to create their own credit market places. Now, let’s get to know Colendi company better, focusing on its primary functions; Through Colendi tools, for paying their shopping, users can receive a monetary loan from e-commerce networks, retail shops, or any merchant with the agreement that the loan will be repaid. In other words, users can do shopping through installments offered by the Colendi contracted merchants. In the first stage, users are required to sign up to Colendi after downloading Colendi APP, and then, there is a need for each user to create their ID and scores through data access permission. Thus, borrowers can use the Colendi application at check-out to receive microcredit if their Colendi scores are sufficient. After that, they have a chance to repay their installments via Colendi platform. All of these transaction details shape the credit score of the users as data dimensions. One of the main aims is to team up with reputable organizations that currently work on enhancing and expanding microcredit opportunities for customers. Whether they are non-profit or for-profit, Colendi prioritizes signing a partnership to provide finance to the unbanked legitimately and efficiently. In that sense, Colendi offers alternative credit scoring mechanism, therefore, the chance to be financially included in the market to previously un/underbanked people through its fintech business model. Due to the failure of traditional credit scoring mechanisms to evaluate people’s eligibility for microcredit, for a long time, most of the global population has been wholly deprived of banking services according to international organizations’ data. In the Colendi platform, the credit score of users is shaped by user-owned data, smartphone, and social media data, and tertiary data sourced from data partners in the ecosystem. In addition to these data segments, Colendi credit history shaped by the transaction and repayment performance of the borrowers is also the main factor in determining their financial scores. Thus, it is important for borrowers to repay their debts on time to have a high credit score, and thereby, eligibility for taking micro-credits. As mentioned above, the users can make their payments for shopping through the personal wallets the users create in their Colendi mobile application. First, users are required to register to the application by creating a pin code and giving their telephone number. And then, personal verification code is sent to the mobile phones of the users. After that, users can start to make shopping from the stores taking place in Colendi merchant list according to the credit amount the users can determine and then, see at the top of the screen of their applications. After users determine the credit amount for shopping, they also have an opportunity to choose the payment system including the installment plan, total amount of repayment, e.g. In addition to the desires of the users, the credit amount is also determined by their current credit scores. At the same time, we can talk about the Colendi Card as a payment method that can be obtained physically, and connected to users’ Colendi ID and scores by users. The users of Colendi Card can improve their Colendi scores after each transaction and through regular repayment schedule. These can be efficiently handled without the risks carried by typical credit cards, such as excessive credit and high-interest rates, and the users can transact with the merchants in the Colendi platform or anywhere a MasterCard®️, and Troy®️ is accepted. Thanks to Colendi Card usage, the aim is to enhance the financial reputation of the users. As we know, the term “utility” referring to the triangulation of the ability to store value, to move money and access credits has become one of the buzzwords to identify today’s fintech ecosystem. In that sense, as Colendi , we are proud to be a part of that ecosystem, offering the real solutions to the problems not only consumers but also businesses mostly face in the market. Sources https://www.afi-global.org/sites/default/files/publications/2018-08/AFI_AfPI_Special%20Report_AW_digital.pdf https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/financial-services/our-insights/global-banking-annual-review-2019-the-last-pit-stop-time-for-bold-late-cycle-moves https://a16z.com/2020/01/21/every-company-will-be-a-fintech-company/ https://www.fintechfutures.com/2018/06/hanseatic-bank-signs-for-collectais-b2b2c-white-label-tech/ https://a16z.com/2019/12/18/the-big-ideas-fintech-will-tackle-in-2020/ https://hackernoon.com/next-generation-banking-27kq33tl https://a16z.com/2019/11/21/banking-on-the-future/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/11/15/americans-and-privacy-concerned-confused-and-feeling-lack-of-control-over-their-personal-information/ https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190307005247/en/Ant-Financial-Launches-Distributed-Core-Banking-Platform ( : ) Disclaimer The author is the Co-Founder at Colendi

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Since 2018

COMPANY RANKING

COLENDI

EVERGREEN INDEX #3244

Colendi WIKI

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Colendi

colendi.com

51-200 employees

Since 2018

COMPANY RANKING

COLENDI

EVERGREEN INDEX #3244

RELATED COMPANIESRANK

STORIES ABOUT COLENDI

Colendi WIKI

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