Collaborative Opportunity: The Results of the First CICO Collective Sprint
How we built a stock financing platform for Nigerian micro-merchants to manage inventory and cash flow with Topos and Boost
After our public launch in fall of 2022, IDEO Last Mile Money’s CICO Collective is proud to announce the results of our first collaborative design sprint.
Together with Topos and Boost, we’ve designed a stock financing platform for Nigerian micro-merchants to manage inventory and cash flow. The platform offers stock financing options, allowing micro-merchants to purchase inventory in bulk and pay in installments, plus financial guidance and management tools to help them understand and manage their finances. This platform gives micro-merchants the capital to grow their businesses and make informed financial decisions.
Keep reading to learn more about our work together, what’s next for the CICO Collective, and how to get involved.
What is the CICO Collective?
The CICO Collective is an experiment about the potential of design-led collaboration to develop new solutions within the Cash-In/Cash-Out space and increase financial access worldwide. With our members, thought leaders, and other community organizations, we’re exploring how we can do more, together. Learn more about the CICO Collective here.
Our first sprint: exploring cash liquidity and cash management
In our first focus area for the collective, we looked at cash liquidity and cash management for agents.
Why liquidity matters
Liquidity is often a major challenge for agents globally. If an agent doesn’t have enough money to complete a transaction — either physical cash or digital funds — then they can no longer serve their customers, and they miss out on an opportunity to generate income.
Merchant-agents
While most companies in the Collective come with the lens of seeing their customers as just one thing — a merchant or an agent — it’s actually much more likely that a customer is more than one thing — a merchant and an agent. In our first of two design sprints under this focus, we focused on merchants who have multiple lines of business. They might own a small shop, as well as work as an agent.
As Agnes Ogallo, an IDEO.org Business Designer who worked on the sprint explains, “Many merchants hold multiple roles. Not being able to have that holistic view of a merchant makes it difficult to serve them adequately.” We focused our sprint on seeing these individuals holistically, and helping them see across all of their lines of business so that they can serve their customers more efficiently and grow their income.
Identifying the right partners
Our design sprint began with a review of the right partners. We brought together two very different organizations, Topos and Boost:
- Nigeria-based Topos, which is essentially a neobank. Topos enables agents to act as a bank branch, where a customer can come to them and withdraw cash, create an account, take out a loan, and more.
- Boost is a B2B commerce platform that enables distributors to digitize their operations. With Boost, they can create & manage customers, receive & process orders, manage inventory, book payments, and access sales & customer insights to grow their businesses. Boost provides radically easy tools like WhatsApp ordering, light web applications with offline features and value-added services like stock financing for both distributors and retailers to grow in the digital economy.
Together, we saw an opportunity to design for the same customer at the center of their venn diagram — merchants who also acted as agents.
Giving agent-merchants a holistic view of their money
Together, we designed an app flow that would give agent-merchants a more holistic view of the cash that they have. Since merchants often find themselves in situations where they have either a physical cash or digital cash deficit, which leads to a loss of business, this app helps solve for urgent float needs.
Additionally, agent-merchants can be more proactive about rebalancing their cash and accessing the float they need. Through this proposed collaboration, merchants can easily make a request for more physical cash or digital funds, and have a delivery person come to them to complete the transaction.
Inventory tracking: a surprising outcome of finding win-win incentives
One interesting outcome of the sprint was the need to build an inventory tracking system. While not something that felt immediately relevant to our CICO goals, it turned out to be an important part of the puzzle.
Aggie explains, “We eventually realized we couldn’t ignore the need for an inventory tracking tool. Often, a shop will bring in more revenue than the mobile money agent business — so an agent-merchant is more likely to devote more time and energy to this. In order to add value and make this app appealing for agent-merchants, we needed to make the connection between their inventory and the cash part of the business.”
In order to better serve agent-merchants, we needed to get to the universal truth of how much money is in the business — which includes both cash and inventory.
Ultimately, this ended up being a win-win and opened up a surprising possibility for collaboration. Topos can finance merchant stock. By giving them visibility over the merchant’s inventory transactions, the solution enables them to have the info they need to assess their risk while financing the stock. For Boost, this app enables their merchants to buy stock on credit without Boost having to manage that process. This access to stock credit reduces the instances of merchants not buying stock because of insufficient working capital.
Our solution ended up focusing on the movement of cash and goods through these partners — not our initial starting point, but it still achieved our goal of easing float management for merchants working at the intersection of two of our CICO Collective partners.
As Aggie explains, “One of the unique things we do through the CICO Collective is find what’s valuable enough to get everyone on board. Getting the incentive for the merchant is one element, but then discovering what would make partner organizations excited about the work is another.”
A small-scale launch in Nigeria: what’s next for the prototype
Looking ahead, both Topos and Boost are discussing the logistics of launching a pilot in Q2 2023. They have aligned on Nigeria as a testing ground, and are looking to take the MVP that we’ve distilled and launch it on a small scale with a co-op of women who are merchants and shopkeepers.
Marco Muccini, CEO of Topos Network, shares his thoughts: “We’re excited to implement something that can go live and generate real data, and pave the way for broader collaborations across the industry stakeholders.”
The CICO Collective has already built a foundation of collaboration, so both Topos and Boost know who owns what task moving and can launch the pilot independent from the Collective, unless we decide to invest further resources into the project.
“A continuous collaborative network could lead to a united front in problem-solving, and help us leapfrog events in the future.” — Marco Muccini, CEO of Topos Network
Get involved with the CICO Collective
Is your company working at the intersection of CICO and financial inclusion? Are you facing similar challenges scaling and growing agent networks? If so, we’d love to talk with you and share learnings. After four years learning about digitizing micro-merchants, IDEO Last Mile Money has a wealth of insights to share.
Want to learn more about the CICO Collective and our work? Stay tuned for an update on our second design sprint coming soon, and join us in late January for a showcase of the prototypes and design projects from the first few months of the CICO Collective. Details here.
