A loan officer who sees the street before she lends

Thandi is a loan officer at a small lender in Durban. She lends to spaza shops, salons and takeaways in the townships. Every application comes with a story, and she cannot visit every street. Some shops have already closed by the time the money lands. Others sit on a street with five copies of the same shop. Last year one in six of her loans went bad. With xMap Flows, Thandi built Streetwise. When a new loan application comes in, Streetwise finds the shop on the map and checks it is open, counts the same kind of shop within five hundred metres, judges how likely the shop is to keep trading, asks Thandi to approve, and sends the owner the answer on WhatsApp. This week, Streetwise checked thirty applications in an hour. Two shops had already closed, and one salon had seven others within a short walk. Thandi spent her afternoons with the strongest twenty, and gave each an answer the same day. Thandi still trusts her instinct. Now the street backs it up.

The story in words