My current investment thesis is based on a combination of :
PAYG Inter-Operability + a.i. / data driven finance
since such combination could open the door to the financing goods and services for approximately 1-2 billion persons currently living at the bottom of the pyramid.
I became interested in the combination of PAYG Inter-Operability + a.i. + data driven finance as a way to enable access to credit for the BOP, after having read this paper:
Behavior Revealed in Mobile Phone Usage Predicts Credit Repayment
by Daniel Björkegren and Darrell Grissen
Marc Andreesen has recently said in a podcast – please note that I am just paraphrasing here – that humanity is nowadays at a time when it is historically most connected, and that in the next years we will experience the benefits of going from isolated thought systems to globally inter-connected systems.
Inspired by Marc, I firmly believe that if we combine:
- an increasingly inter-connected population located in emerging markets – enabled by inter-operable systems rather than tolerating that such information be kept behind walled gardens – with
- a .i . / data driven finance
we could soon expect to add billions of consumers/producers to the global economy, despite the fact that such persons do not have a credit record, ids, any significant assets, etc.
In sum, I am looking to add to my impact portfolio, seed stage startups active in frontier or emerging markets that are capable of mining smartphone behavioral data to create mobile users credit profiles, similar to:
‘The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed’
William Gibson — The Economist, December 4, 2003
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