‘MICROMATE’ provides a solution where loan officers use the capabilities of mobile applications to reduce the inefficiencies in their daily activities in two key areas, management of daily transactions and the reporting nature of their role. The mobile applications allow loan officers to get data on the field enabling new account creation, and easy management of existing accounts. This way the loan officer is able to reach more end consumers of these loans thus helping the MFI hits its objective of market penetration.

MicroMate is a technology platform to improve efficiencies of the micro finance loan appraisal and execution process. Through an integrated software and wireless hardware solution, our product reduces the time involved in initiating and maintaining a micro finance loan. Our customers will be able to make rapid decisions about their loaning capabilities by using real time data through wireless medium.

Based on our research, almost all loan officers today have a mobile device either a cell phone or a PDA that they carry to the field. ‘MICROMATE’ proposes to store relevant data on these devices and to also allow loan officers to reach their head office data wirelessly to gather or collect more relevant information on the accounts. Thus new account creation, tracking and editing existing accounts takes a matter of seconds versus the hours that the loan officer spends today. By cutting down on travel time and providing immediate access to data, ‘MICROMATE’ expects the loan officer to make better-educated decisions for their clients. As a result the clients outreach increases serving the MFI’s needs.

‘MICROMATE’ is an n-tier, service oriented architecture that assures scalability and optimum performance. The Web Service API’s enables “future-proof” solution to be easily assembled and deployed across all delivery channels, including wireless devices, the Internet, ATM centers, payment gateways and traditional branches. Our solution caters to all the front and back office requirements of a MFI by straight through processing capabilities, extensive parameterization, multi channel architecture and multilingual support. This enables MFI’s to achieve a consolidated view of any member, group, federation, and office across all service delivery channels. ‘MICROMATE’ is designed to deliver distributed or centralized solution to an MFI.

Our pilot client is Chaintanya, (www.chaitanyaindia.org), a developmental organization in India started in 1993. Chaitanya is one of the pioneers in Self Help Groups in Maharashtra, India, with considerable field experience in promotion of local community based institutions. With operations spread over 3 zones in the state of Maharashtra in India, Chaitanya is working with 805 Self Help Groups with over 14000 women members.  Initial discussions are ongoing with national and rural banks, which are entering the field of microfinance, to initiate use of Micromate, end-to-end solution for microfinance