32 C I M F I N A N C I A L S E R V I C E S L T D Group Review (continued) G R O U P R E V I E W We recently formalised our strategic investment into Fundkiss, approved by the FSC. Fundkiss is a peer-to-peer digital lending platform that has disrupted the Mauritian SME lending market with its innovative offering. Our investment will enable us to support the Fundkiss team and strengthen their business, and most importantly, provide important institutional funding to SME projects so they can scale their businesses. We see our investment into Fundkiss as an important component of our SME strategy. During the year, in addition to the key initiatives highlighted in the business review, we invested in a number of digital capabilities to strengthen our core business. Our in-house Analytics team, which we have been reinforcing over the years, has been churning out deep insights from the data warehouse, enabling us to make more data-driven decisions. For instance, the Analytics team collaborated with Experian to enhance our current apps, as well as build new application (new clients) and behavioural (existing clients) scorecards for our CFA, MoCrédit and Collections. This will enable us to credit assess clients within minutes and to better discriminate risk, thus helping to improve the quality of the credit portfolio. A Collections scorecard will also be able to predict, based on past payment performance, which clients should be prioritized. This will further improve our collections productivity. Our Technology team plays an equally vital role in accelerating our digital transformation efforts. The team led a big effort in rolling out our Robotic Process Automation (RPA) across a number of areas in our Mauritian and Kenyan businesses, including: bulk AML screening of 11 million records; automatically downloading and collating relevant data from over 3,500 SMEs and corporates from MNS; as well as an MCIB tool that combines all relevant data from MCIB reports for our credit risk teams to review. In Kenya, where we have been using RPA for both KYC analysis and fraud checks, we have managed to significantly reduce our operating costs, while avoiding having to recruit staff to carry out these manually-intensive processes. Our Operations team has led the Shared Services initiative, which entails the implementation of a Shared Service Center delivery model customised to our specific requirements. The bespoke model will consolidate operations activities across business units into one single unit, enabling the Sales BUs to reshift their focus on sales activities and allowing for greater economies of scale and efficiencies. We have successfully implemented a pilot project with our Leasing operations this year and now aim to deploy it across the rest of the business in the next year. Our continuous efforts in transforming our business through technology paid off, with 85% of our backoffice staff able to seamlessly work from home when the lockdown was announced. Cim Finance has historically always had a strong physical presence in our partners’ brick-and-mortar locations; however, in these changing times, we believe a hybrid working model, combining both physical and digital channels, is the way to go. In continuation of our strategy to become a technology-driven organisation, we made great progress inour Technology Transformationprogramme to revamp our technology infrastructure and build a strong digital ecosystem. We have completed the first phase of implementing a new Multi-channel Model Platform, focused on replacing our legacy Leasing system. Over the course of the next year, we will progressively replace the core system that supports our Consumer Finance business. Big strides have been made in developing our (API) Application Programming Interface layer through our new Enterprise Services Bus (ESB), with more STRENGTHENING OUR CORE BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY AND DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION INVESTMENTS TO STRENGTHEN OUR CLIENT OFFERING
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