By Herjola Spahiu
For close to a decade now, I have been working in the microfinance sector as the Executive director of NOA. A financial institution invested in ensuring constant and efficient access to finance for small entrepreneurs, farmers, and low-income families, NOA has exposed me to all kinds of situations. From ambitious self-employed individuals to well-established large family businesses, in most cases, our financial solutions were a human answer towards a socioeconomic challenge. When we travel hours to visit a customer living in a remote rural area or when we keep our offices open to businesses until 20 o’clock, including the weekend, we are offering a service that goes beyond the “numbers” side of our financial products. Microfinance, for us, is all about answering the human challenge of access to finance, even when we are talking “digital”.
We have invested heavily in NOA’s tech capacities by lowering further the costs of accessing and processing our products. Online applications, biometric smart tablets for our field loan officers, digital customer profiling, full virtualization of our data servers, etc., we have made every possible step to narrow the physical, temporary, and administrative gap of the way how our services are delivered. By increasing the user-friendliness of these services, our objective is to accelerate and facilitate the process of how our customers reach us. But digitalizing doesn’t mean dehumanizing.
Once we have received a customer financial request, independently of the digital channel, we always make physical contact to have a clear understanding of the need we are funding. Some clients may seek rapid financing, which does not allow for a full assessment of the danger of over indebtedness. Only sincere and transparent human contact can overcome such fears. Others may seek larger tickets that can’t be fulfilled by traditional banking procedures, for many reasons. Again, only a thorough human exchange can overcome strict interpretations and identify risks properly. And I believe that this is what makes microfinance and NOA a pioneer in serving our customers, identifying the risk, and finding always the way to mitigate it!
We always try to innovate in the way how we “connect” with our customers. But not in the digital sense, but rather on the human dimension of the financial products we offer and customer experience level. Do you lack a file to fulfill your financial application? Our customers can send it independently from the digital or physical channel they chose. And we accept close to every channel currently existing in the market. Same about the timing, you can reach us at any time. What about risk assessment? Our loan officers are fully mobile, meeting and assessing our customers’ requests on-site. This implies them taking digital pictures of their small business premises or a digital identification of their identity through biometric readers.
In all cases, for us, getting digital is not replacing human contact. Rather increase the service quality and the security of this contact. To put it short, microfinance, means the very human finance, even when it’s digital!
I couldn’t agree more with you Herjola – we lost our way during the Celtic Tiger era ( mid 2000’s ) by neglecting & bypassing the individual & relying on formulae , ratios etc to make good credit decisions