clinicPesa

A mobile medical bank for uninsured Africans.

clinicPesa provides access to healthcare financing through its digital micro-savings and lending platform, where the uninsured low-income earners can save as low as $0.30 per day cumulatively and receive loan top-ups dedicated for healthcare. This is done through their mobile money wallet and for early planning to ensure patient affordability and convenience.

clinicPesa leverages the already popularized mobile money platform, to extend its services to the targeted millions of Users across Africa through partnerships with Telecom Operators.

- Completed a Pilot with 390 customers on savings and microloan top-ups.

- Closed over 220 healthcare provider partners on the clinicPesa platform.

- Closed a partnership with MTN on mobile money infrastructure and market access

- Closed a partnership with a commercial bank to leverage the bank’s license.

- Developed a credit score engine using mobile money transaction data.

- Acquired a lending license from the market regulator.

- Ecosystem partnerships with Villgro Kenya, MIT D-Lab, google cloud for startups and Financial Sector Deepening Uganda (FSDU).

- Fully implemented scalable digital solution infrastructure integrated into the mobile money system and bank.

- Pre-score over 2 million pre-qualified credit worth Customers for the debt portfolio.

Team of 33 full time and 1 part-time member.

Progressing.
Commercial launch with MTN
Raising a $4.7 million round through private investors and donors.
Team capacity building

The Market opportunity is a 35 billion dollar market growing at 6% annually with over 1.2 billion people without access in Africa.

According to the Statista report on Rate of insurance penetration in Sub-Saharan Africa in 2017, more than 1.2 billion people in Africa have no access to health insurance, since insurance penetration is under 2.8% in Uganda.

Approximately, 930 million people spend at least 10 per cent of their household budgets on health expenses ( for self, a sick child or other family members). For almost 100 million people, these expenses are high enough to push them into extreme poverty, forcing them to survive on just $1.90 or less a day, according to the World Bank report 2017.

The major problem faced here is the lack of access to healthcare financing as a result of;

- A great bias towards insurance due to loss of unused annual premiums. Locals look at the insurance as a loss rather than again due to their annual unused insurance premium that expires, hence not re-subscribing to their annual insurance premiums.

- Expensive health insurance premiums, currently ranging between USD 200 to USD 1500 per individual annually with income levels of less than $5 a day.

- Insurance under-serve since Insurance companies focus on urban areas leaving out slams, rural and peri-urban areas.

- Most times locals have to make hard choices between other basic needs like food, education and shelter; and purchasing premium medical covers which are expensive and not flexible yet most times sickness comes when least expected.

- Some of those in formal employment have their insurance offered to benefit their employers in which most times, it covers their children and spouses only, even then the cover may exclude some illnesses.

A medical mobile bank that provides access to healthcare financing solutions targeting over 1.2 billion uninsured Africans and their families.

The solution enables low-income earners and the uninsured to set aside dedicated funds for health care, earn interest these savings and access loan top-ups.

Users set aside funds as low as USD 0.3 either daily, weekly or monthly and can even set a standing order. At the time of need, these funds are used to offset their medical bills using the savings and microloan top-ups in case the funds saved are not enough. clinicPesa uses machine learning to determine the creditworthiness of the User.

This will lead to the affordability of health care, increased doctor visits, eliminate self-diagnosis and also eliminate poverty as the users will not have to sell their source of livelihoods to clear medical bills.

Currently, we have the following options; Insurance Firms that provide health insurance packages, Loans platforms that give unsecured loans like Talla and branch, Modern health saving schemes like M-TIBA, Mobile savings platforms like Mshwari and Mokash.

M-Tiba has a potential of being a very competitive competitor has they offer a slightly similar solution to clinicPesa, but we have elements like the interest of up to 7% on savings and loan top-ups which they don’t offer. This works in our favour.

Our advantage over other solutions include;
- Our service is entirely free for our users so as to enable them to plan earlier for their family healthcare protection.
- Rather than selling annual premiums, we use existing mobile money and voice calls records to automatically score members in real-time in-order to finance their medical needs.
- Rather than the unused annual healthcare finances expiring, they are carried forward to the next financial year with an interest rewarded to the clinicPesa users.
- Rather than the clinics waiting for a month or two to receive their payments, they are able to receive their collections in real-time which is withdrawn through their bank account on a button click. This also provides them with access to documented cash flows in-order to easily access a loan facility from our partner bank to improve their quality of services and expansion of services.

Revenues generated in the next 5 years (Income)

Year 1: $2,599,739 , Year 2: $12,175,229, Year 3 : $23,890,713, Year 4: $34,913,927, Year 5: $46,394,780

- We have a very sustainable model which includes
- A 1% transaction fees on withdrawing by facilities.
- A 1-7% of deposits paid back to clinicPesa as revenue by the partner bank, (Escrow account revenue)
- Loan Fees charged on every loan taken by the clinicPesa customer enabling the business to generate around 46 million dollars in the 5th to 10th Years of operation annually in just one market (Uganda).

- Branding, Local sensitisation and customer acquisition.
- Customer engagement guide and retention including Customer care centre.
- Product Market Activations, news learnings and more research.
- Develop, disseminate promotional and communication materials at health centres for market outreach.
- Product ambassador to onboard the network of health centres.
- Innovate new products inline with value chain as value-adding services.
- Administrative and overhead cost.
- More Lending capital.(Debt)

EQUITY/CONVERTIBLE:
- USD 700,000 at a USD 5,000,000 pre-money valuation and open for other terms negotiations.

DEBT:
- Capital of USD 500,000 to USD 1,000,000 issued under a revolving credit facility or tranched exposure with 3% to 7% Annual interest for between 5 to 6 years.

1. Micro-loans repayment default- failure to repay micro-loan top-ups by the users after the stipulated period.

Mitigation
- Mobile money auto sweeps (deducting the loan amount directly fr om their mobile money accounts).
- Starting with lower amounts and analysing the repayment patterns before moving the user to a higher healthcare micro- loan limit
- Regular mobile money usage data for credit scoring.
- Regular notification reminders to repay the loans.
- Partnering with international corporations like Johnson & Johnson, G4A among others for easier market entry in the African markets wh ere clinicPesa is operational for corporate social responsibility to de-risk and subsidize the loans.

2. Poor Saving culture-The African savings culture is on the verge of growing and people are in the process of fully embracing the benefits of savings.

Mitigation
- Using savings as a parameter to determine the rate of micro-loans limit growth for the users.
- Providing an option for setting a standing order (Auto save) from the mobile money of the user.
- Partnering with organizations with a focus to promote Universal Health Coverage (UHC) in co-saving with the users.
- Rolling over Savings with up to a 7% earned interest after every 12 months through the banking partnership.
- Using the telecom’s freebies eg. Data bonus,call vouchers among others to motivate and reward regular savers.
- Sending regular reminder for savings to the users

3. Access of clinicPesa at a healthcare facility by the user-Slow healthcare facility onboarding, limiting the options available to the user at clinicPesa’s healthcare facility panel.

Mitigation
- Recruited 25 product ambassadors to facilitate healthcare facility onboarding process at the pilot phase through Financial Sector Deepening Uganda (FSDU)’s support.
- Automated online account creation request and status tracking platform for the healthcare facilities to enhance a seamless onboarding process with a wider geographical scope.
- Leveraging MTN’s brand and converting MTN’s healthcare facilities already accepting mobile money payments
- Automated systems for organised cash flow data for ease of access to business credit
- Customer traffic growth at the healthcare facilities translating to their business revenue growth.

We were part of the Microsoft Insiders4Good fellowship which ran from June 2017-Feb 2018. Make-IT accelerator in 2018. Onyancha was then a fellow with the MIT D-Lab fellows in 2019.

We have received different Awards including Global Female fintech Award 2019, MIT Solve community Award 2018 among others.