Alliance Hack 2020

The Alliance Hack 2020 called for innovative tech-based solutions in four challenge tracks—banking, wealth, insurance, and payments. We designed these challenges to address barriers that keep women from accessing and benefitting fully from financial and non-financial services.

Tackling these challenges were thirteen teams; six working on banking, four on wealth, two on payments, and one on insurance. Each of these teams applied with an innovative proposal that they are now developing into a scalable solution with support from the hackathon’s excellent experts and mentors. The teams hail from ten different countries—including Canada, Germany, Ireland, Kenya, Malaysia, Nigeria, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, and the United States—reflecting the global nature of both the Alliance network and the issues at hand.

Tracks and Challenges

The Alliance Hack aims to support innovative and inclusive business solutions to unlock the full value of the female economy, in any of the following sectors: banking, wealth and asset management, insurance, and payments

Expanding access to finance for women SMEs'

Women owned/led very small businesses; often semi-formal, are a vast un-served and underserved segment when it comes to accessing finance for their business. FSPs lack sufficient information and documents to underwrite loans. Women also lack sufficient information/financial know-how to demand the appropriate finance for their businesses.

Challenges within Banking

1. Women-owned informal SMEs face high barriers to financing.

2. Female business owners lack holistic solutions to help them grow.

Transforming women's investment capabilities

Women’s relationship with wealth continutes to be impaired. This is because of a focus on immediacy instead of long-term planning and a lack of connection with financial advisors.

Create a solution that helps encourages women’s investment capabilities.

Challenges within Wealth

1. Many HNW women are underserved by the asset management sector.

2. Many women lack confidence in long-term financial planning and investment skills.

Building women-led SMEs' resilience

Women SMEs continue to be under-insured globally. This is because insurance providers have not developed appropriate products that meet women’s life cycle protection needs or that fully support building women’s resilience during times of crisis such as Covid-19. Women usually prioritize family well-being, are mistrustful of insurance products, and may lack the financial education to understand insurance products, or may not be aware of their benefits.

Create a solution that would improve women business owners’ resilience.

Challenges within Insurance

1. Women have particular insurance needs that are often unmet.

2. The women’s market represents an untapped opportunity for the insurance industry

Designing payment solutions for women

Women businesses in emerging markets have very limited access to digital infrastructure to transact and make/receive payments, especially in remote areas. The current solutions through money operators and FSPs is both expensive as well as cumbersome for them to access.

Create a cost-effective digital payment solution requiring basic infrastructure setup granting women-owned VSEs and SMEs, especially in remote areas, payment solutions to build their financial capabilities.

Challenges within Payments

1. The gender gap in account ownership extends to digital payments, as well.

2. Women want strong advisory relationships and technologies – instead, they’ve gotten pink cards.

Alliance Hack 2020 Winners

The Female Economy FinTech of the Year

TymeGlobal is working to bring down barriers that keep women from accessing finance in South Africa, including their limited data footprint, collateralized-based lending infrastructure, and unconscious bias on the part of both the financial institutions and women SMEs. To overcome these challenges, TymeGlobal is partnering with Jumper.ai to expand the data footprint of women SMEs and increase opportunities for lending from financial institutions. Together, Tyme and Jumper.ai will provide the tools to open digital storefronts on social media through Jumper’s conversational commerce platforms and sales bots, enabling female entrepreneurs to better manage their inventory, fulfillment and delivery, and payment systems. This will allow Tyme’s women-led SMEs to increase revenues and better track revenues, providing the foundation for alternative data credit scoring and opening up access to financing.

Female Economy Silver Fintech

Ndovu seeks to close the gender gap in investing causes by barriers to access such as large amounts of money needed to get started, high financial advisory fees, and opaque, jargon-filled processes. Ndovu provides education, advice, and access to help women achieve their longterm financial plans and build financial resilience. It does this through two steps: 1) financial planning with an app that provides simple educational tools to improve users’ financial knowledge, and 2) investment management based on each users’ financial goals and provides returns significantly above the savings rate, helping them to recover.

Female Economy Bronze Fintech

GFI Fintech is a data analytic tech company that specializes in profiling technology for the financial industry. It develops cutting edge solutions by integrating multiple scientific disciplines, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, behavioral sciences and psychometrics. Its flagship product – GFI – which is an AI-based psychometric credit risk assessment, predicts whether an individual will default on a loan and has been used since 2018. GFI enables banks to confidently lend to customers with no formal credit history – many of whom are women. It allows banks to expand its market, improve repayment and contribute to enhancing the economic empowerment and financial inclusion of women and low-income individuals.

Shortlisted Teams

DAKKO Wellbeing is a financial wellness platform dedicated to improving financial access to Health and Wellbeing and giving rewards for taking care of your health. As a solution for banks’ corporate clients, DAKKO Wellbeing can be a tool for companies to engage with employees, facilitate company functions such as HR and Finance, and improve employees’ health and wellbeing. Ultimately, this will help companies to improve productivity, employee turnover, and shape the company culture.

DigiAlly is a comprehensive platform for women-owned SMEs to capture their credibility, transactions and financial position across ecosystem via provable digital trust of DA fabric. DigiAlly will link SME ecosystem participants and capture relevant data in a verified format that can be later used by Women Owned SMEs for multiple purpose including availing credit, winning projects, building customer confidence, enabling employees for digitization, and more.

GFI Fintech is a data analytic tech company that specializes in profiling technology for the financial industry. It develops cutting edge solutions by integrating multiple scientific disciplines, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, behavioral sciences and psychometrics. Its flagship product – GFI – which is an AI-based psychometric credit risk assessment, predicts whether an individual will default on a loan and has been used since 2018. GFI enables banks to confidently lend to customers with no formal credit history – many of whom are women. It allows banks to expand its market, improve repayment and contribute to enhancing the economic empowerment and financial inclusion of women and low-income individuals.

Friendsvow is connecting people with Financial Credit. Friendsvow is a financial management APP that helps you to save money and get instant financial credit from your friends, family, and colleagues. The Friendsvow financial management model protects you and your friends in the event of delay or default on repayment.Friendsvow is digitizing the informal system of credit, making Friendsvow the Facebook of Credit; Facebook connects people socially, Friendsvow connects people financially, using the same model. So, when Friends, family, colleagues transfer funds to each other, they will be transferring cryptocurrency which automatically converts to your local currency USD, Euro, Pounds, or any currency of choice.

Monkiri is an e-learning app that teaches people about financial concepts by helping users access and understand the financial services that are available to them. Through education, Monkiri is bringing more people into the formal financial service industry responsibly and improving the quality of customers for financial service providers. Monkiri also provides a financial literacy credit score that correlates users’ financial literacy skills with real world financial behaviour. This allows the app to provide risk-assessments for clients who lack traditional credit risk indicators such as formal employment or asset backings. The Credit Scoing system is still in development and testing.

Owoafara solves the access to finance and business support problem of over 50 million underserved small businesses by building crowdsourcing platforms that provide loans and business services to them and allow everyday people invest and build wealth. With its women trader program, Owoafara is bringing credit closer to market women leveraging its introducer program.

RedRose is a social enterprise that leads the market as a technology service provider with end-to-end, fully integrated easy-to-use humanitarian data management platforms, specializing in beneficiary registration, digital identity (including biometrics), e-voucher solutions, cash payments and asset transfers. Established in 2015, RedRose operate in over 40 countries to assist INGOs, IFRC/ICRC and the United Nations to deliver in excess of 200 e-voucher, cash and NFI programmes that serve more than 70 million beneficiaries across a number of humanitarian contexts.

Suscrip is a shared economy app that can connect to your bank and identify a shared expense either for you or your business.

Women Investing Now (WIN) aims to solve the Advice Gap, particularly for women, in a way that saves employers $500 billion in employee financial stress cost and enables financials to recoup $700 billion in lost revenue, by delivering on-demand personalized financial guidance and immediate action steps in response to users’ questions on a fully customizable financial wellness platform. WIN was designed to solve (1) the unique financial needs facing women due to the wage gap, pension gap, workforce journey, longevity, scarcity of time, risk of poverty, and management of 80% of single parent households; (2) the inability of the majority of financial providers and products , including employee wellness programs, to engage and serve women well, and (3) the gender-neutral need for accessible relevant right-on-time trusted guidance and seamless take action.