Winning Back Ate Josie, Our yufin Power User

Shubhrendu Khoche  •  July 12, 2024

Shubhrendu, Co-Founder & CEO, visiting a yufin user behind the counter of her sari-sari store

This win back is special.

Started a few larger last-mile participants to order their weekly stocks with yuOrder this week. But the win back with Ate Josie is more special. She had been a power user of the yufin mobile application for more than a year but suddenly stopped using it two months ago.

Decided to pay her a visit and see how her business was doing. Found out that she stopped using the yufin application because she had to sell her smartphone. In turn she sold her phone to pay off an informal money lender. As it happens, she had to borrow from this second informal money lender to repay the daily interest due to another informal money lender.

Sounds like a classic debt trap.

It’s a proof of her resilience that after receiving death threats for not repaying a $400 loan from the first money lender, she closed her business for a month and literally hid at her relatives’ place in the mountains. There she managed to work odd jobs and save enough to be able to order some weekly stocks again this month.

For all the talk of financial literacy and achievements in financial inclusion touted at conferences, there are millions of Ate Josies who are borrowing at 40% interest weekly from ‘emergency’ funds to repay interest payable on their regular 20% per month loans borrowed mainly to buy their weekly stocks.

There is an abundance of resourcefulness and resilience at the last mile that is begging to be monetized. Ate Josie sold her phone but not her phone charger.

She now provides ‘phone charging as a service’ to day boarders and students near her business for Peso 20 for every full charge. Five such transactions equal her daily interest payments to the current, third informal money lender.  It’s a lucky coincidence that her informal money lenders do not have a central data exchange to share defaulter details.

Yes, she is back on yufin since yesterday and will be ordering with her daughter’s feature phone using our assisted yuOrder service from an authorized reseller.

She is waiting for the yuMall service so she can sell even items like beauty & wellness products and accessories that she cannot afford to stock today but her customers demand, and also to try out the inventory financing service from yufin to reduce her borrowing costs by half.

But her last comment still haunts me. If lending is such a good business, why can’t she do it instead?