Frubana, a B2B online marketplace for the food service industry, has partnered with global nonprofit Accion and the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth to provide embedded financing solutions to small-scale restaurant owners in Brazil. The partnership seeks to provide access to credit to more than 200,000 micro and small businesses (MSEs), helping them meet their working capital requirements and increase financial resilience through enhanced capacity to overcome liquidity shortfalls.
Access to working capital is one of the biggest pain points for Brazilian local restaurant owners and the businesses that supply them. Small-scale agriculture accounts for 77% of Brazil’s agricultural production, and more than 2.5 million small-scale restaurants and food establishments source fruit, vegetables, meat, and other products from these farms to run their food service businesses.
Traditional procurement of produce and other food industry suppliers and informality lead to a lack of financial records — preventing small restaurateurs from accessing formal credit and driving up their costs.
Frubana connects small-scale restaurant owners with smallholder farmers, food processors, and manufacturers, providing them with access to supplies, software, and responsible credit. This can help reduce operational costs, speed up transactions across the marketplace and increase income in a fragmented industry where many operators are unable to build a robust credit history, as required by the formal banking sector.
Accion and Frubana have developed an embedded credit offering utilizing alternative data sources in the credit decision process. This new approach has the potential to move millions of small business owners from an expensive, cash-based supply chain to more affordable access to the marketplace.
Juan Pablo Garcia, head of Frupay, Frubana’s financial arm, said, “Small restaurants in the food industry in Brazil are largely invisible to the financial system. Small-scale restaurateurs are often unable to access credit to meet their working capital requirements as the lenders often perceive them as high-risk customers due to irregular cash flow and insufficient formal financial records.
“Through this collaboration, we seek to innovate our credit appraisal mechanisms and develop better payment and credit solutions for these small business owners to help them access crucial credit that can push their business growth.”
Leveraging machine learning tools, Accion and Frubana developed an algorithm based on alternative data attributes and their ability to predict MSE creditworthiness. Since then, Frubana has issued 80,000 loans and approved 80% credit applications, with one-third of the approved loans disbursed to new-to-credit and new-to-business customers. Frubana said the delinquency of the portfolio has been outstanding; non-performing loans are lower than the company’s expectations.
Jonathan Blanco, senior director of digital lending for Accion Advisory said, “In Brazil, local restaurants and food producing businesses, particularly those owned by women, have long been prevented from accessing credit due to high costs and complicated credit application processes. We see huge potential to serve these segments by leveraging digital platforms and the data that flows through them to create a better financial picture of these businesses.
“Through this partnership, we are moving beyond conventional scoring mechanisms and using alternative data to establish creditworthiness of small business owners and developing tailored and affordable financial products that can help them run and grow their business.”
“Small business is the biggest business in the world, making up 90% of businesses globally,” added Luz Gomez, vice president, Latin America and the Caribbean at Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth. “Through this effort, we look forward to expanding responsible financial services to millions of new micro and small enterprises in Brazil and drive their inclusion in the financial ecosystem.”
This initiative marks the next step in Accion’s eight-year partnership with the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth that supports the transformation of financial service providers, digital platforms, and fintechs. The long-standing partnership aims to help 23 million people across 25 countries benefit from the digital economy across a variety of programs.