String analytics, a big data management and market intelligence company founded in 2019 by Mugo Bhatia and Ndungu Muigua based in Kenya. It helps organization to understand data by providing tools to the customers directly to interact via a range of channels. This offers big data analytics as a service, providing solutions for data management and visualization, as well as predictive analytics and credit scoring. The company’s approach goes beyond wholesale reliance on quantitative methods. The aim of the string analytics is to stimulate the economic growth in Africa by powering access to finance. The company aims to urge the growth in MSME sector by creating solutions that leverage on alternative data from different non-traditional sources.
In Africa, from Agriculture to ICT, MSME’s are the key drivers of economic activity across all sectors with over 70% of Africans working for this category of company. One major challenge that MSME face us lack of finance, which has made difficulty for the establishment and growth potential of businesses. Many of the MSME are unregistered and operating informally. Another challenge is that the MSME face is poor cash flows and lack of technical expertise.
Mugo Ngatia, co-founder of the company said, “Our credit scoring solution is robust and can generate credit scores based on alternative and traditional data provided by different institutions and across different data sources. The scoring engine can handle large amounts of data and can be configured to run in real-time/daily/monthly depending on the frequency of receipt of the underlying data via our machine learning algorithms”. On the other hand, our market intelligence solution is powered by the ability to collect data directly from customers via mobile phone channels such as USSD and SMS, as well as using our pool of enumerators across the continent to collect data face to face (powered by apps over mobile devices) or through telephone interviews. The company is in the progress of signing an agreement with a Nigerian entity for business development opportunities in Nigeria and Ghana.
