Much of the world is skint, but they still want to use mobile phones. This is the dilemma mobile finance startup Juvo has been created to address.
It all comes down to microcredit – extending very small loans to people who, at first glance, are pretty far from low-risk. In an era defined in the developed world by the absurd practice of credit scoring agencies offering to improve your supposedly absolute and objective score for a fee, many people don’t even have one to manipulate, let alone the cash to do so even if they did.
The mobile industry is increasingly looking to developing markets for growth in both handset sales and service revenue but, of course, per capita disposable income is much lower in such places. While us pampered, bourgeois westerners may not think twice about dropping well over a grand on a two-year iPhone contract, in much of the world the average phone purchase is well under £100 and service is on a strictly PAYG basis.
