Digithon 2018: Bangaldesh
Hackathons are quite the scene. You may find a large number of empty energy drinks. You could see programmers releasing pent-up coding frustration by throwing playdough at the wall (wait, what?). Or perhaps you’ll watch teams bounce ideas off each other seemingly faster than the speed of light.
In short, you’ll probably have your mind blown. After all, hackathons are about taking transformative ideas and coding them into reality.
That’s precisely the goal of VEON Global Digithon. The main purpose of Digithon is to foster innovation and cooperation by mixing up teams from the VEON group 10 operating countries. Prior to the global Digithon, national Digithons are held at each of our 10 operating countries.
A few weeks ago, Banglalink Bangladesh selected their Digithon winning teams.
Many students do not get access to Tertiary Education in Bangladesh due to economic situation, and about 89K students drop out every year after their first year in universities. To address this problem and give the students access to education team “Jinjira” has come up with a unique proposition, a platform marrying investors with students.
The winning team “Jinjira” presented “Pori-borton”, an online platform where the students can get loans from Individual contributors. The contributors can choose the students to whom they want to give the loans based on the credit rating of the students. The credit rating will be calculated based on the mobile usage behavior of the students through an algorithm that considers various behavioral factors (on top of the conventional telco KPIs).
The students can keep on getting loans by maintaining a certain ARPU/recharge threshold every month, they don’t need any collateral and guarantors. A portion of the customers ARPU will be shared with the third party credit assessor and the individual contributors who are giving the loan. The return percentage on the loan amount will be higher than the market rate and there will be no minimum amount for individual contributors for loan.
As the loan is crowd-sourced there is no pressure on a single contributor to give the entire loan amount, the students can get loans easily from many contributors with minimum investment in their mobile ARPUs. The third party can earn the premium from disbursed loan amount for the credit assessment risk. On the other hand, the operator gets a loyal customer who keeps giving an ensured ARPU for a long time.
