Executive Summary

Finance is undergoing a profound transformation. Digital technologies are reshaping payments,

lending, insurance and wealth management – a process that the COVID-19 pandemic has
accelerated. While this is making financial services in many economies more diverse, competitive,
efficient, and inclusive, it may also increase concentration in markets.
If we can recall a familiar African proverb: “If you want to go fast, go on your own. If you want to
go far, go together.” Banks, insurers, and payment companies don’t see fintechs as “little more
than pinpricks for a banking mastodon with trillions in assets,” as The Economist so colorfully
described the fintech-bank relationship in 2020. As we see it today, these relationships are more
symbiotic than combative. With partnerships, fintechs get to scale their technology and access
capital to grow, while financial institutions gain assistance in their efforts to improve product
offerings, increase efficiency, and lower costs. As it turns out, these are all goals with special
relevance to low-income customers who look for products that are more convenient, less
expensive, and higher quality, and that makes financial institution-fintech partnerships a crucial
strategy for meeting the financial needs of the unbanked and under-banked in Uganda. A number
of technologies are enabling this trend, and mobile phones are perhaps the most salient. The
GSMA, a global association of mobile network operators, reports that by the end of 2021, two
thirds of the global population had a mobile subscription, with that number expected to grow by
1.6 billion by 2023. A second potentially transformative development comes from the massive
amounts of data resulting from mobile phone usage and the digitization of commerce, goods
distribution, utility payments, etc. coupled with advanced data analysis tools.

According to a 2017 report by the Financial Stability Board, Financial Stability Implications from
FinTech, technology can help provide “easy to understand and convenient services, which tend to
lower costs of adoption and lower barriers to access for customers.” Henceforth we are proposing
and requesting to formerly and officially work with GTBank as our banking partner in that the
bank can work with our well-built catalogue of committed agents to avail its financial and other
services to customers wherever they are in Uganda. And while technology is expected to have a
significant and highly positive impact on financial inclusion and the current financial infrastructure,
there are potential risks associated with it too. Prior to this partnership proposal, JVIKI
Technologies carried out research, and thereof, when asked why they partner with fintechs to
pursue financial inclusion, banks, insurers, and payment companies often note that it would take
three to four times the resources to develop the same technology in-house, and they appreciated
the way fintechs like JVIKI Technologies enable them to engage with and learn from new
technology in low-risk, low-cost ways. Therefore, strategic partnerships with fintechs can help
legacy financial institutions innovate quickly and prepare for new market competitors by
establishing a superior digital experience with more specialized, higher quality, and lower cost
services. A bank like GTBank can use the proposed partnership to reinvent itself to be platforms
where customers are empowered again, to learn to move and rotate around customers. We hope
that GTbank may find this proposal useful as it crafts its own strategies for leveraging JVIKI
fintech for financial inclusion as the partnership can be forged to address challenges related to
Gaining access to new market segments; Creating new offerings for existing customers; Data
collection, use, and management ; Deepening customer engagement and product usage. The
proposed partnership can capture the creativity, dedication, and foresight that the bank and JVIKI
fintech bring to bear as we address the problem of financial exclusion.

Problem Statement
Digital innovation is transforming financial services. Innovations in financial technology such as
mobile money, peer-to-peer or marketplace lending, rob-advice, insurance technology (insurtech)
and crypto-assets have emerged around the world. In the past decade, fintech has already driven
greater access to and convenience of financial services for retail users. Meanwhile, artificial
intelligence (AI), cloud services, and distributed ledger technology (DLT) are transforming
wholesale markets in areas as diverse as financial market trading and regulatory and supervisory
technology (regtech and suptech). A host of new firms have sprung up to apply new technologies
to meet customer demand and most incumbents indicate that digital transformation is a strategic
priority. Indeed, leading banks are rapidly closing gaps in digitization of internal processes and
customer offerings, to compete with fintechs and the large technology (big tech) firms that have
also entered the fray.
These developments have the potential to make markets more diverse, competitive, efficient, and
inclusive, but could also increase concentration. Innovation has introduced competition and
increased inclusion, particularly in emerging markets and developing economies. Fintech seems
to have thrived particularly in markets where the financial system had been less developed.
The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the digital transformation. In particular, the need for
digital connectivity to replace physical interactions between consumers and providers, and in the
processes that produce financial services, will be even more important as economies, financial
services providers, businesses and individuals navigate the pandemic and the eventual post-
COVID-19 world. For instance, the pandemic has already accelerated the shift to digital payments
It has also intensified e-commerce, which may benefit big tech firms and their activities in
finance.

Open banking initiatives require banks to share customer data with fintechs. In some jurisdictions
banks must initiate transactions introduced by fintechs upon customer request, further eroding
the traditional incumbent-customer relationship. At the same time, public payment system
innovations have allowed access to non-banks. On the one hand, open banking Application
Programming Interface (APIs) enable non-banks to offer payment initiation services, without
them having to participate in any of the payment systems themselves. On the other hand central
banks are requiring transparent and risk-based access criteria for payment and settlement
systems, replacing earlier restrictions of access to only banks. Through our market research, we
have observed that although there is a proliferation of financial technology (Fin-Techs) companies
in Uganda, there are still a lot of opportunities that are un explored. Key among these
opportunities is direct partnerships between the banks and the financial technology companies.
We humbly request to partner with GTBank as our banking partner. In this regard, we make our
partnership visible to the end user of our services and thereby extend the banking services to
corners where the bank may not be interesting in setting up physical presence. This presents a
growth opportunity for JVIKI Technologies as well as the bank as the bank can ably reach out and
provide its services to the customers therein.
In addition to bills payments, we also intend to extend Agency Banking services on behalf of
GTBank when that opportunity arises. We believe the technical team as well as our team can
have this service implemented securely and without exposing the bank to risks.

Rationale for the Proposed Partnership

The proposed partnership will help to brainstorm and develop projects that take a purpose-driven
approach to business engagement in digital finance that supports both parties along our journey
to self-reliance.
With the right enabling environment and ecosystem of market actors, digital finance-or more
broadly, “FinTech”-can foster greater efficiency and transparency, resilience, and empowerment
across a variety of contexts, whether in agriculture, health, education, energy, or governance.
The impact of these gains can be felt by Guaranty Trust Bank (Uganda) as the bank progresses
on its journey to self-reliance working with JVIKI technologies agents: women, youth, micro,
small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs), rural communities, and others. And yet, these
gains cannot be assumed as foregone conclusions. Experience shows that banks like GTBank have
a clear role in helping account for both the opportunities and risks of a digital economy to ensure
it is truly inclusive.
By collaborating with an emphasis on local market actors and systems, further engagement with
the JVIKI Technologies and its Fintech agents can foster the growth of vibrant ecosystems for
digital finance and financial inclusion-and ultimately, inclusive digital economies that create
opportunities for all. Engagements are grouped by objective: what the GTBank might want to
accomplish and how to identify the most appropriate respective roles of the stakeholders thereof
in achieving the objective.

One of our major reason for this proposed partnership is to enhance financial inclusion, in that
when any individual or business can improve their economic empowerment and financial well-
being by having access to and being able to effectively use a full suite of financial services
(accounts, payments, savings, credit, insurance, etc.) that are affordable, accessible, and secure.

As partners, we can ably enhance the use digital technology to enable or deliver financial services
ie the service could be delivered by any type of agent firm, start-up or incumbent, retail-facing or
back-end, with services or underlying infrastructure as diverse as mobile banking, digital credit,
mobile money, digital payments, and data analytics. The FinTech application in question might,
for example, be developed “in-house” by a GTBank and be effortlessly accessed through a
vendor relationship with a third-party mainly JVIKI Technologies’ agents, among other ways.

Engage with and work through local systems: The proposed partnership will strive to reinforce or
seed local expertise on FinTech or innovation. As partners, we can ably consider who in the
market should be prompting the desired change, and identify ways to catalyze them to act, if
possible, include a component for building local capacity by, for example, equipping local
innovation hubs, or advisory service firms with tools for taking the lead. We can also consider the
importance of of introducing new ideas or expertise to the local market through our agents, given
lessons in FinTech from elsewhere.

To mobilize and enhance the participating agents’ investments: It will be upon us as partners to
apply resources to catalyze the use of capital or expertise to sustainably serve underserved
communities with inclusive digital-enabled financial services. When working with specific
providers, for example JVIKI Technologies’ agents rely on open applications where feasible and
pay attention to competitive dynamics to minimize the risk of undue market distortion. Similarly,
together we can use pilots and public good research to de-risk (or equip) similar efforts by other
local stakeholders. This can stimulate new forms of collaboration, innovation, and problem solving
in the banking sector or in the many areas of digital financing.

The proposed partnership can effectively prepare us to take a multi-prolonged approach to fill the
market gaps; most marketplaces do not have a single, discrete issue that impairs the growth of
inclusive, competitive digital finance ecosystems. In fact, the reality is quite the opposite. As such,
while the illustrative services provided by our agents to different communities of the market while
engaging one-by-one, they are often most effective if executed within a portfolio of other actors
or in the context of a larger initiative that can be responsive to a host of different market needs
or dynamics.

The proposed partnership can be of value to keep an eye on end-user/client outcomes especially
if our immediate focus is on the service providers ie JVIKI Technologies’ agents: Our partnership
engagement efforts are likely to influence the outcomes for individual agents or stakeholders (e.g.
Mobile money providers, smallholders offering agent banking etc), businesses, and government.
Together we can choose to avoid focusing solely on how investment is unlocked or how many
participants enter the market place.
Objects of the Proposed Partnership
1.To learn Customer needs. GTBank and JVIKI Technologies as partners will be able to identify
key pain points and insights that enable the design of better, inclusive financial services.

2.To improve the enabling environment for financial services. As partners, we can inform policy-
making and strengthen market support functions that enable responsible, technology driven
innovation and financial inclusion.

3.To jumpstart market entry; As partners, we can effectively facilitate the flow of expertise or
capital to technology-enabled financial services providers.

4.To facilitate the ease of adoption. As partners, we can work together to overcome obstacles in
extending reach to new customers and in testing and adopting new products.
Financial service providers often struggle to nudge new or potential clients along the customer
adoption path: aware, understand, adopt, test, habitually use, and refer to others. The proposed
partnership intends to overcome such challenges.

5.To extend to “Last Mile”, as partners, we do have power and capacity to reach new or
underserved communities and businesses.
By virtue of the presence of bank-supported initiatives in underserved communities, GTBank can
play a role in facilitating the extension of these formal, technology-enabled financial services.

6.To define the problem (i.e., market gap) and its link to the development priorities of both JVIKI
Technologies and GTBank.
Together we can talk to consumers especially through our agents, businesses, tech firms, banks,
and financial service providers; identify market gaps and challenges at each level of the market
system that might influence our ability to make sustained progress toward priority development
outcomes.

What JVIKI Technologies can Offer

With the proposed partnership and GTBank as our banking partner the case for an all-embracing
financial inclusion can be realized. In this case inclusion is not just about new products and new
distribution channels, it’s about reimagining, with the help of collaborating partners, new ways to
deliver micro-moments of value for the financially underserved people of Uganda. And the best
way to unlock value for these customers is through working together as partners.
Our market research and Agent exit surveys as well as engagements with current agents and
company financial forecasts suggest that we can only favorably compete in the market if our
partner GTBank allows a rate between UGX 250 and UGX 350 per transaction.
We at JVIKI Technologies hereby request to make a counter proposal to urgently discuss with the
GTBank otherwise we shall soon be driven out of the business owing to the current rate the Bank
is offering. This rate further disadvantages us by having high overheads and we cannot
comfortably facilitate our product marketing staff let alone our own service support staff.
We hereby propose that the bank allows us a rate of UGX 250 per transactions on probationary
basis for one year for which we shall set a target of 30,000 transaction traffic to be appraised
after one for which we can revisit and have a discussion basing on these set targets. We intend to
grow this traffic throughout the year to volume 40,000 transactions.

We hereby request the bank to allow us a grace period of one year with the above rate and see
our progress to a mutually set target that can in the long run be mutually beneficial to all of us.
We request that the GTBank gives us a target number of transaction we should hit in a year at
the given rate which we can set out to archive at the requested rate of UGX 250. We could then
meet and appraise at the end of the year with our finance team which can be a basis for making
the arrangement a permanent one once we meet the target.
Working together with GTBank our banking partner, we make our partnership visible to the end
user of our services and thereby extend the banking services to new corners where the bank may
not be interested in setting up physical presence. This presents a growth opportunity for JVIKI as
well as the bank.
In addition to bills payments, we also intend to extend Agency Banking services on behalf of
GTBank when that opportunity arises. We believe the technical team as well as our team can
have this service implemented securely and without exposing the bank to risks.

Opportunities
Through this proposed partnership GTBank-Uganda can ably gain access to new market segments
JVIKI Technologies will always offer the bank ways to reach and acquire unbanked and
underbanked segments of the population that have steadily been working with the company’s
agents. It is a true story in Uganda that onboarding lower income customers via traditional
means has been a mainstream finance challenge for decades for all the banks. Building physical
branches in remote areas, for a dispersed population with low-value accounts, for instance, is not
viable in most circumstances. Digital technologies, however, make it more cost-effective to
acquire and serve low-income populations, overcoming physical barriers and long distances.
Digital tools have provided lower distribution and operational costs, greater scale, faster and more
convenient service, more affordable and accessible products for low-income individuals, and
ultimately a larger customer base for financial institutions.

The proposed partnership may create new offerings for existing customers because together we
have the ability to create profitable and useful services for existing customers in the lower market
segment. This provides easier and steadier revenue for financial institutions (as compared to
acquiring new customers), and serves as an on-ramp to greater usage for customers who do not
yet use a full range of financial services. The partnership is also expected to increase customer
loyalty and keep them engaged in the long-run.

Another opportunity is in the areas data collection, use, and management. The proposed
partnership can ably address the major challenge to deepening financial inclusion in emerging
markets is effectively collecting, using, and managing data. Financial institutions have always
maintained data on clients and used it to assess creditworthiness, segment clients, and design
new products. But now JVIKI Technologies can work with GTBank to organize and mine their
data. For financial inclusion, data analytics are focused on calculating risk profiles for individuals
traditionally excluded from the formal economy. Many individuals on the margins of the formal
economy are rejected for loans because they have no formal credit history.

Working together as partners or collaborating with us can enable us to enhance their risk
modelling techniques. For example, utilizing advanced algorithms to assess customers with limited
or no traditional credit history and using psychometric scoring to increase credit access to
underserved SMEs.

The partnership can provide a platform to improve data management processes. Useful data
management relies on the ability to efficiently obtain, store, retrieve, structure, clean, and analyze
large bodies of data. This is a monumental task, and best practices and requirements are rapidly
changing. Therefore, partnership with a fintech company like JVIKI Technologies can help
improve data management across the organization can be of tremendous value, helping the bank
lower costs, identify customer potential, reduce fraud, increase cross-selling opportunities, and
expand the institution’s customer base.

Another opportunity lies in deepening customer engagement and product usage. Through this
proposed partnership, we can work together to address the challenge of deepening customer
engagement and product usage. It is true that because large portions of the population in
emerging markets are outside the formal financial sector, bringing them into it requires financial
education and enhanced interfaces for customers.
Working together we can realize the importance of creating ongoing engagement and frequent
interactions with new low-income customers to build stronger relationships and increase loyalty,
trust, satisfaction, and ultimately retention.

Partnership can help us focus on increasingly using digital tools to provide additional and more
effective customer touch points. We can use an all-embracing platform enhance the customer
experience, but do not alter the financial institution’s product and service offerings. The
automated customer relationship is much less expensive than in-person branches or banking
agents. Moreover, automation creates a digital record of what helps increase customer
engagement, which can be used to inform increasingly tailored outreach. This proposed
partnership focused on customer engagement typically aim to increase usage and hence
profitability for existing or newly acquired customers.

Our partnership may go a long way in shaping the future of customer engagement, institutional
strategy, and the general trajectory of the finance sector. All of these will have special relevance
to the inclusion of new or disengaged customers into the financial system. We can use the
proposed partnership to deliver more choices to customers-as in the case of providing new
payment products to their existing customer base, making products more usable and accessible-in
this case the partnership will increase customer engagement, and scaling products to sustainably
offer services to lower income people. All these goals will be critical to building trust, improving
relationships, and building capability for a new set of customers.

We can also use the proposed partnership to seize the opportunity of driving institutional-level
innovation. Through the kind of partnership we are proposing, GTBank can be able to learn what
is possible and shift its strategies to account for this. With the help of partnership, the financial
institution can test technology in low-risk ways, better understanding how it works for their
customer base. Together we can also organize for our own innovation, creating ways to test and
learn, try and fail, and speed up the timeframe under which this happens.

The partnership may be a key to allowing GTBank to compete in a world where alternative
players are challenging the role of financial institutions in the lives of customers. By offering
better, less expensive, and more innovative products, financial institutions can assert their
continued relevance as customer-facing institutions. If financial institutions can continue to learn
from fintechs, and if the relationships can continue to be mutually beneficial, we see a bright
future for partnerships enabling financial inclusion and development of their customer base.

Partnership Strategy
Our strategy is to be a partner with GTBank as our banking partner in a way to facilitate digital
financial transactions using our agents with an agreed commission commitments. We will listen,
gather information and ideas; and help to identify desired results, progress indicators, and
strategies. We will provide coordination, facilitation, and partnership management support, along
with regular communication so the financial institution can know where the fintech service
provision through our agents stands, without having to do all the work. We foster this visible and
realistic working partnership and leverage resources and expertise to reach our intended
objectives. Upon agreement, JVIKI Technologies will continuously be willing to adjust to new
ventures that are of mutual benefit when they arise depending on the prevailing dynamics of the
working environments.

Company Capacity

JVIKI Technologies Limited is a Financial Technology based company founded in 2019 and
registered under the laws of Uganda. JVIKI Technologies has partnered with GTbank Uganda to
extend GTBanks payment services i.e. Uganda Revenue Authority, Umeme, NWSC etc to last mile
consumers through its agents and outlets throughout the city. JVIKI Technologies Limited is
currently managed by two Directors i.e. Mr. Buyondo Moses Kibwami and Mr. Edwin Michael
Luyiira.
JVIKI Technologies Limited has adopted a business model that takes into consideration the
current financial challenges that are faced by our agents. The business model is that we consider
financial needs of our agents and where needed we extend a 0-interest credit facility to the agent
to allow the agent to extend services on behalf of JVIKI and then remit funds at the end of the
day. We understand the risks associated with this business model, however, we vet our agents
very carefully and we extend this care plan to only women in an effort to improve the financial
inclusion of women in the country. We observe that many women would like to join the workforce
as entrepreneurs, however the capital barriers to entry are very steep and in many cases these
women do not have security to qualify for loan facilities from commercial banks. With our
business model, we recruit these women, sign partnership agreements, then provide them with
the Point of Sales terminal and startup funds. To date, this model has been very successful at
recruiting agents in a market that is overly competitive and crowded by service providers. We
always promise to build proper accountability and transparency systems backed by an effective
communication and feedback strategy.
Additionally, JVIKI also boasts of a very experience team that manages to address agent
challenges in a timely manner as well as improve services offering guided by customer feedback.
The company started off with a vision to on board 250 Agents to extend our services to the final
consumers i.e. bill payers throughout Kampala city within the first year of operation. However, we
have faced and are currently facing major challenges that include failure to competitively reward
and keep our Agents which is immensely hindering our growth of traffic as well as the company.
This has further discouraged our potential investors to invest in a bid to expand our services to
many areas outside Kampala metopolitan. We are optimistic that if the proposed partnership
takes off we can ably change the situation and enhance our performance and expansion targets.

Exit Strategy
We propose that we can agree on a mutual exit strategy depending on the duties and
responsibilities agreed upon us as a result of this partnership. As we nototiate for this partnership
we can ably agree on the conditions that can enable each party opt out