Neem joins hands with BPC

To further its mission of bringing financial wellness to underbanked communities, Neem selected BPC’s SmartVista platform to power its embedded finance technology infrastructure to offer a simple user experience for Neem’s partnering communities and their underbanked users.

As an embedded finance platform, Neem is on a mission to enable full financial wellness for underbanked communities. Neem is embedding financial products and services including payments, loans, insurance, and others into communities across diverse sectors, including agriculture, MSMEs, ecommerce, fintech, logistics, healthcare, and others.

In September 2022, Neem has raised USD 2.5 million in seed funding to build and scale financial wellness focused Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) and lending services. At Neem, financial wellness underlines control over four components for a better overall financial health: payments, where people have control over the finances and have an efficient way of doing it; credit facility which is reasonable in line with what they need to grow, for example for working capital; insurance which is a protection plan; and savings and investments for future.

Pakistan’s underbanked community

As an emerging financial market, Pakistan has over 200 million individuals and 3.3 million micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSME) which are underbanked. Embedded finance is globally recognised as the future of financial services and a model with the potential to bridge the financial wellness gap, especially in emerging markets.

Pakistan has, therefore, for long had a financial inclusion problem. Fintech startups in Pakistan have been focused on increasing this access to a bank account and credit facilities. There are other components too, however, which require control over for better decision making and consequently a better overall financial health. Neem does exactly that for consumers as well as MSMEs.

Pakistan offers immense opportunities to leverage the power of payments innovation, as the country transforms into a future-proof economy under the initiative ‘Pakistan the Digital State’, which impacts all industries from agriculture, healthcare, education, commerce to government and financial services.

Embedded finance to spur financial inclusion

The World Economic Forum estimates that over six in ten Southeast Asians remain underbanked or unbanked today. This is a growing concern as Southeast Asian economies are largely driven by MSMEs, and these businesses and their customers need access to capital and other financial services to sustain post-pandemic economic recovery.

While reaching the unbanked and underbanked demographics is a complicated problem to solve, there is no doubt embedded finance offers faster, cheaper, better alternatives to overcome some persistent barriers to financial inclusion. For those without a bank account or easy access to financial services, particularly in emerging markets, it provides them with the means to digitally store money, makes cross-border payments, and possibly even invest, with nothing more than a smartphone and an Internet connection.

As more companies start including embedded finance in their payment process, the growth of innovation and new revenue streams in financial services will escalate. This would bring about a future where financial services could be accessed anytime, anywhere.

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