Gravity provides a decentralised identity platform based on blockchain technology to enable secure and easy data sharing. This can be applied to different use cases. One of them is supply chain financing (SCF).

Gravity’s supply chain finance solution builds trust among financial service providers, suppliers and shopkeepers through data sharing and unlocks financing opportunities in Africa.

We help micro & small retail businesses access finance by enabling them to set up a financial profile that they can use to apply for business loans. These profiles allow lenders to improve the credit scoring of merchants and thus lower the interest rates.

After realising the potential of using the decentralised data-sharing platform to enable access to working capital, Gravity wanted to build a solution tailored to supply chain finance.

Shopkeeper: Has a micro/small business and is interested in buying goods on credit

Distributor/Supplier: Sells FMCG goods to retail

Lender: Gives digital micro loans

As the only designer on our team at the time, my responsibilities were to design the UI and UX for this specific use case of the application. This meant leading and executing the entire design process from start to finish.

The aim of this project was to understand the FMCG supply chain and it's actors, determine a process flow for the SCF solution and design and implement the user interface that the small businesses would be using.

Constraints were to provide good UX while still abiding to W3C standards/decentralised identity standards. In addition, the difficulty was that we needed to build a product that can provide credit quickly and seamlessly fits in the delivery and sales process in this fast moving sector without wasting anyone's time.

As the first phase of the design process and after an extensive desk research on digital loans and FMCG supply chain, I conducted a survey with 117 micro- and small businesses. I wanted to get a better understanding of the problem, in particular the shopkeeper’s needs around access to working capital.

I also got in touch with various FMCG distributors as well as digital lenders to make sure their pain points are also taken into account and needs are met.

Shopkeepers:
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• Access to working capital is a big challenge
• Only 29% of distributors sell goods on credit
• 99% of shops interviewed keep records, however hardly anyone digitally

Distributors:

• Distributors have a digital purchase history of each and every customer
• Payment is usually on delivery
• Time of interaction at point of delivery is max 5min

Lenders:

• Lenders don’t extend affordable loans to small businesses because they can’t access their business transaction data and use it for credit scoring
• More data leads to a higher accuracy in credit scoring which results in lower interest rates
• Good KYC is important for them

This validated our hypothesis that by leveraging the purchase history distributors have about their clients and making this transaction data available for lenders, we can create a win-win-win situation for all parties. Shops get affordable loans, distributors sell more goods and improve their customer relationships and lenders are able to tap into a new market at a lower risk.