By Sai Hnin Aung, COO and co-founder in MicroMoney

One good idea is not enough to build a worldwide business today. Especially when you need to scale your business, to spread your success, and to enhance your services. Now the most successful projects are not those that have a unique idea but those that make the existing services more comfortable to use, faster and cheaper. That’s why it’s important to examine your and the other industries and learn.

For our company, MicroMoney, a social lending provider, it was important to enter new markets very fast. A good example of a scalable business model is the fast food restaurant chain McDonald’s, the company that changed the world of the food consumption. Their restaurants are the same everywhere and they are everywhere as well. The company follows all new tech tendencies, it is an information-centric organization that makes data-driven decisions.

For example, the company uses Big Data analytics to optimize the drive-thru experience based on three factors: design, information provided on the menu and the types of customers coming through. Looking for trends in increased consumer demand, such as large cars of customers coming through, can be particularly beneficial for improving efficiency and preparing for that spike in demand ahead of time.

MicroMoney is trying to use McDonalds’s experience in a totally different industry — the social lending. We have the aim to change the way people work with financial and banking services.

We made our first steps in the Southeast Asia — Cambodia and Myanmar. It’s not easy to get a loan where: a borrower has to bring at least five paper-based certificates, a collateral, a person to vouch, and then to wait one or two weeks for a loan application approval. In cases one of this point is missing, e.g. a person has no credit history or no time to collect a package of documents, the classical bank approval for a loan application is practically impossible.

MicroMoney set the goal to provide its social loans online completely, within just several minutes from completing an application form to money receiving. Artificial intelligence algorithms, machine learning, and Big Data analytic tools are working for MicroMoney’s scoring system to assess a client’s creditworthiness very fast (like McDonald’s service is). Instead of certificates and cross checkings, for the scoring process we use the data available from a borrower’s smartphone. A customer just downloads the MicroMoney’s mobile application, complete the loan application in it, and gives a permission the access these data.

Then the scoring self-learning system analyzes all the data sources like social accounts, messages, contacts, searches in searches engines, applications downloaded and even the time user spend completing the form — more than 10,000 parameters. As a result, the system sets a credit rate and identifies potential credit risks with an accuracy of more than 95%. If the system approves the loan, money are automatically sent to a customer’s e-wallet or a bank card. This new method of assessing and funding might change the whole finance industry because it creates a win-win situation for both consumers and financial companies allowing them the process all the credit operations in minutes.

Moreover, MicroMoney follows the McDonald’s approach to rapid scaling and typifying the processes. We already came to Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia, based on fast expansion foundation: franchise model, strong local partner, local employees, identical processes, and the unified call center. For example, in Sri Lanka and in Indonesia we were able to launch in two months only, according to this scheme. In the nearest months, we are going to enter several more countries: the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, Hong Kong, India, China, Singapore, Nigeria, and the rest of African countries. All these offices will have a single multilingual call center based in Bangkok that started to work in September.

MicroMoney plans to approve about 600 thousand social loans per year and, thus, involve 1 million of customers by 2020. We want to change the industry as McDonald’s did.