AgelEgypt

Company Brief

Agel is a Sharia-compliant trade finance platform; aiming to provide alternative financing options that cater (“MSMEs”) Micro-Small & Medium Enterprise’s needs. Islamic financial offering exists to provide a variety of religiously acceptable financial services to not only Muslim communities but also as an alternative for non-Muslim clients seeking ethical investments and greater risk diversification

Agel is trade finance platform reshaping the traditional financial services business model, operational model, and customer experience to unlock a unique finance avenue for (“MSMEs”), with a core proposition of availing industry-agnostic merchandise credit limit for Merchants within the Agel network in a manner that is Digital, Cashless, and Sharia compliant.

Leveraging in-house capabilities, Agel have launched a digitally enabled offering built on a pioneering agile platform without the constraints of legacy systems tailoring the Merchant’s journey towards obtaining credit lineson AGEL B2B Network.

The term (“Agel”) refers to the Arabic word (“آجل “) which means (On-Credit), and this is considered the oldest form of trade-finance known to Merchants before banks and financial institutions were introduced as it referred to obtaining merchandises on credit between wholesalers & retailers in markets, and this service still exist in local markets until today, due to lack of financial literacy of Merchants and their inability to access credit from financial institutions.

Product

AGEL has launched an MVP of a fully-fledged trade finance platform to cater to MSMEs in Egypt with a culturally relevant offering; we have developed software combining an alternative core credit engine assessment module, a full back office, and a loan officer module, a three-tier user interface modules, and finally connected the modules with a prepaid card scheme to cover the processes defined hereunder:

Wholesalers App and Closed Loop POS:

This module of the application was the most challenging for us to develop because not only did we focus on delivering the customer experience that appealed to the wholesaler, but also we needed the module to support our sharia-compliant offering. This module is divided into a software component represented in an easy-to-use application that enables the wholesaler to track his sales, calculate his dues, and monitor the performed transfers, in addition to a hardware component represented in a closed loop (POS) granted by AGEL for free.

Retailers App

This module is built in a client-centric mode to cater to the merchant’s low financial literacy and technology adoption while putting him on top of his sales purchases and operations. The module enables merchants to locate wholesalers in the network and arrange them by location, special offers, and/or several sales interactions. Further, the application grants merchants the ability to perform merchandise purchases seamlessly manner and choose the payment plan that suits them in addition to keeping track of all purchase records and bills along with notifying them of upcoming payment dues, overall credit limit, and rates of consumption.

Alternative Credit Assessment engine:

We focused on building our system from outside to inside, so instead of approaching merchants with the traditional credit scoring playbook, we conducted broad market research by which we reached an understanding of the set of information and documents that the merchants already have and are comfortable sharing and build our scoring system accordingly by the identifying the available common factors and setting a weight of each of those factors so instead of refusing to grant you credit for lack of history we enable you a controlled amount that you get to develop by building your history with us.

Target Market

Agel has started penetrating the market through the fashion industry as it has healthy margins that would allow for supply chain financing. Fashion consumption in Egypt is 20B/USD annually, where 20% is imported, and the rest, 80%, is produced locally. the industry is the second largest after FMCG, and it contributes to more than 5% of the GDP of the country.

Meanwhile, we are working on testing the pharmaceutical industry through partnerships with medicine distribution marketplaces by onboarding their pharmacies into our platform. The pharma sector is the third largest industry in Egypt, The market reached USD 6.3 billion in value in 2021, and it’s classified as one of the most resilient sectors against a market crisis.