Stellapps’ fintech business unit mooPay, enters into a partnership with Samunnati to scale its financial inclusion agenda

Stellapps’ fintech business unit mooPay, has become a Business Correspondent of Samunnati, one of India’s largest Agri enterprise lenders. This strategic partnership will help mooPay to fulfill the working capital requirement of farmers associated with its network of dairies. Samunnati is using mooPay’s credit underwriting engine  “mooScore™” to evaluate farmers for loans. A key goal of this partnership is to ensure that credit access is made available to those who need it, when they need it, and with minimal friction in rural India. By using this innovative alternate ‘flow-based’ data, mooScore enables access to even “new to credit” (NTC) farmers who are considered sub-prime, and thus normally would not be able to access institutional finance.

Commenting on this partnership, Rahul Mallick, CEO, mooPay, said, “At mooPay, we aim to provide financial services that are tailored and customized for dairy farmers and help them improve their household income. We are very happy to partner with Samunnati and accelerate our vision of creating a rural neobank to quickly reach a million farmers.

mooPay plans to deploy the funds to rapidly scale its financial inclusion agenda from 2100 to 4500 villages by this financial year end.

Evolution of mooPay

mooPay is a wholly owned subsidiary of Stellapps technologies, a tech driven, dairy led integrated food value chain provider.  Stellapps leverages advanced analytics and artificial intelligence through its full-stack IoT platform to enable dairy ecosystem partnerships with financial & insurance institutions, veterinary services, cattle nutrition providers, agro-input providers etc. to create significant value for each stakeholder including smallholder farmers. Stellapps started in 2011 by building out the foundational parts of its Digital Access Network (DAN) and as an entry strategy, providing end to end digitized supply chain solutions.

Milk is the largest crop in India, and 25% of Indian households (approx. 76 million Indian households) are engaged in dairy farming. Of these 66% are small and marginal farmers with average cattle holdings of 1-2 animals. India has the largest bovine population in the world but milk productivity/animal production in India is abysmally low (1/9th of the USA). Farmers income, profitability through dairying is low, traceability is inadequate, and quality is not up to the mark. By leveraging futuristic technology to create a digital dairy ecosystem that promotes partnerships across the dairy value chain, it is possible to improve farm productivity (i.e., farm income), milk quality, bring traceability in a completely offline supply chain, and thus, help unlock significant value for smallholder dairy farmers.

 

mooPay, the fintech vertical of Stellapps is an innovative data driven embedded financial services vertical, which offers financial products tailored for dairy farmers. mooPay is focused on creating financial inclusion and economic empowerment of small holder farmers and more than 65% of its customers are farmers who have never taken an institutional loan i.e., from a regulated entity (finance company or bank) and are thus considered ‘subprime’ by most lenders. mooPay started in the year 2019, has over 70000 registered farmers and makes direct farmer payments worth USD 3.4 million every month. It is currently disbursing 1000+ loans with an average ticket size of $290. Using the historical data of the quality and quantity of milk that farmers pour, mooPay has developed an alternative creditworthiness score, called mooScore™ in conjunction with Equifax, one of the world’s leading credit bureaus. Using AI driven credit risk models, mooPay assesses historical ‘flow’ data and provides details to its banking partner that help underwrite credit risk, thus expanding lending capacity by originating new clients. With these analytics an eligibility list is generated and shared with the farmers showing what kind of loan product every farmer is eligible for, every month.

Farmers avail different loans based on their requirements. The lending products include milk receivable financing, small/sachet loans, cattle loans and farm improvement/farm equipment loans.  With increasing presence mooPay expects to reach a monthly disbursals of INR 10 crores by end of FY23.   Farmers are also accessing different financial services like Aadhar based payments, domestic money transfer, bank account opening from our moo ONE centres.  The payment gateway/platform of mooPay transfers over INR 300 Mn to the farmers bank account every month against the milk procured by dairies.

 

“An inclusive approach involving all stakeholders is vital to unlocking the full potential of the Agri chain for the benefit of all. This has been a key driver of Samunnati’s go-to-market strategy. In this context, we are excited about our win-win collaboration with Stellapps through which we are extending financial support to Dairy value chain farmers” said, Anilkumar SG, Founder and CEO, Samunnati.

mooPay aspires to become the leading technology driven neo bank for rural India offering innovative products and superior customer service, while driving the agenda of financial inclusion.