Morning, everybody. Thank you for being here on the call. We've got the Chairman of Ethos Capital, Yvonne Stillhart. Thanks, Yvonne, for joining us this morning and listening in. The presentation, as well as the voice recording, will be made available on the Ethos Capital website a bit later today. Feel free to check in on that to the extent needed. First of all, let me start by saying thank you to Bassim for being here today. We really appreciate it. We appreciate all the effort you've made to be here and to share more about the business. It's been a fascinating journey for Ethos Capital since, I think, 2019 into the company, partnering with you. You've done a phenomenal job in building this into a very interesting business. We really appreciate all the effort you've made.
The Optasia investment is a large investment in terms of the NAV. I've spoken to most of our investors over the last week. I think they all recognize it. To date, we've put limited information out on the business. We've basically had two slides in a pack, which we kept rolling forward to provide people with a sense of what is in the business. With the consent of the company who's agreed to this presentation today, they're going to lift the bonnet a bit and share with you more data points around what they built up over the last while, so that you can start getting a real sense of this investment and why we're certainly quite excited about the investment. With that, let me first of all just hand over briefly to Mike Jensen, who leads it from Fund VII side, who will introduce Bassem further. Thanks.
Thank you, Antoine, and thank you everyone for your time this morning. Bassem presented about two years ago at the Olin to yourselves. I think since then, the business has moved on quite a lot. The growth projects that were always in the pipeline have come to fruition. I think there'll be some good news in this story, and that's notwithstanding the significant headwinds from currency that this business has faced in emerging markets. Looking forward to the presentation where, as Antoine mentioned, there'll be quite a lot more detail than what we presented previously, which is more of an intro. We're getting into a bit more substance of the business. Thank you.
Thanks.
Hi. Good morning, everyone. Are we going to project this on the screen here? All right. Can you guys hear me? Yeah. My name is Bassim Haidar. I'm the Founder of Optasia. Just a bit of history for those who don't know me. I was born in Nigeria, Lebanese parents, and I started Optasia when I was in Nigeria at the time. I've started about nine different companies, exited four of them. One failed, which I had to write off, but it is a different story altogether. Many years ago, more than 12, 13 years ago. I have very successful business, but Optasia is one of the largest ones and the most successful business to date. This is just a disclaimer because of the confidentiality here. Obviously, I'm sure you're aware of the sensitive information here. I would like you please to just respect this quite a lot.
I've introduced myself. What is Optasia? It came out of the idea to try and solve a problem of simple airtime credit. As you know, people in emerging markets, especially Africa, use prepaid phones. 95% of users even today still use prepaid phones. One of the annoying things is they will always run out of airtime credit. They won't be able to purchase bundles. They can't make calls, et cetera. We decided at the time, is there a way that we could solve this problem by providing credit to these guys, unsecured credit, but what data sources are there out there to be able to allow us to provide credit to these customers? We found that there was a very rich set of data sitting with the telcos.
We were able to convince one telco to start with us initially. We mined that data, structured it, and were able to actually create the first scores. Very primitive at the time. It went quite successful, and it plateaued. Why did it plateau? It's because the technology we had at the time was not robust enough. I went around the world, tried to buy a company that could actually build the new generation platform, and hence why we are based out of Greece. We bought a company. They built our AI platform when really no one was talking about AI and machine learning. We were one of the first to actually build this and use AI and machine learning to create scores. I'll explain a bit later. It's not only about scoring, it's actually everything else we do around that flywheel.
Really, our vision is to continue to use our AI-led technology to help our partners grow our network and provide comprehensive financial access to retail and SME customers, which is something I'll talk about a bit later. What is the market? Everyone would think, "Yes. Oh, the market dynamics are changing. People don't use the airtime credits on." That's actually very far from being true. You can have a technology but if you don't have the business model and you don't have the relationships and you don't understand the markets you're operating in and you don't have the financial capability, you're not going to have a successful business. What Optasia has been able to do is actually to put everything into this flywheel. We obviously started with a very powerful B2B2X. What that actually means is we are not connecting to end users directly.
We are connecting through mobile operators or financial institutions. That allows us to be a white label company, which means that we are not regulated by either the telco regulators or the central banks of this world when we deliver our services. This model not only has worked, but actually has been very robust and is constantly repeatable. Of course, we continuously improve it, but it's been a big driver of expansion and a very, very big driver of strong profitable growth. As I said, it takes more than just the technology and an idea to put things together, but the management that we have in place is world-class. All our data scientists, we have about six data scientists with PhDs in math and statistics, and we have 58 data scientists with master's degrees. That's the quality of the people that we actually have.
That is just on the data science part. This is not on the technology building part, which is another 78 people, then you have the different layers of management, commercial, finance, and so on. Everything is digital that we do. There is no paperwork whatsoever. From the moment we integrate with a telco or a bank to delivery of the money or the airtime, it is all digital. There is absolutely no paperwork involved, no guarantors or any of that. This cycle continuously repeats itself, and it gets back to where the large and expanding markets. When I talk a bit later about one of the products, the microfinance solutions, I am just going to give you a bit of a hint of the size of the market, and where we are today. We have a strong network of distribution partners.
We are actually in 42 countries right now, we have expanded significantly, meaning there is no single country where we rely on that could actually hurt this business in any way. We are pretty much diverse across Asia, Africa, and Middle East. We currently carry data, more than 900 million customers we have data on. When you look at Twitter's got about 300 million, and they do not have rich data like we do. Actually, in terms of richness of data and in terms of quality of data, we are far more superior than, for example, Twitter. Far, we have lent about $20 billion to date since we started, and we have taken 58 billion credit decisions. This speaks to the robustness of the platform.
Obviously, it goes without saying, the barriers to entry are significant here, as you can imagine, because from the beginning, from 2013, one of the first things we did was to make sure we patent every single technology. Today, we sit at about 160 patents, which completely protect our technology. Everything we build has been built in-house. We do not rely on a single third party, everything completely proprietary to Optasia. Just a snapshot. Again, $20 billion. We do about $380 million plus a month currently in distribution with very little capital requirements. This is the beauty about our business because of the speed that we rotate our loans. On average, an airtime credit customer will borrow around 11 times, and a cash customer borrows about 4.6 times. That dollar repeats itself very aggressively, very often. These are the distribution partners.
We would have the banks on one side here. Here, we will have the telcos. As you can see a lot of the big names here, many of them are familiar to you, the Vodacoms, the MTNs, du, Airtel, Omantel, Ooredoo, and so on, and we have 60 deployments. What do we mean by deployments? It takes actually a lot of engineering when we go to deliver our solution in a country. We took the decision, and it is a company policy, to actually put local servers behind the firewalls of every telco, every bank, in order to protect customer data and in order to comply with local regulations. This is something we have done. Currently, we have about 3,000 servers sitting across 60 deployments in the world. The three key areas, which I will talk about in a bit, is the airtime advance, the microfinancing, and the data monetization.
This is our footprint. We actually did start somewhere here when we first started end of 2012, early 2013, and you can see the expansion. This is incredible growth, trying to learn more cultures, figure out all the different microclimates for every single deployment that we do, the credit scoring, the behavior analysis, and so on. Every single deployment you see here is successful. Every single one of them. People used to ask me, "What makes you not sleep at night?" If you asked me that question in 2019, 2020, I would tell you Nigeria, our dependence on Nigeria, because Nigeria, it's not a country, it's a continent in a way, 200 million people. More than 60% of our revenue used to come from Nigeria. One of the things we really strategized and we said we must remove our dependence on Nigeria.
There's a lot of business out there. We need to really grow outside of Nigeria. Actually, we've managed in under five years to make Nigeria 50%, yet we continue to grow. It's not like the Nigeria revenues dropped. It's actually because we've managed to grow and South Africa has actually become our largest single market today in terms of revenue. As you can see, we do not have a lot of dependence on one single country that could potentially hurt the business. Nigeria really defined Optasia's historic exposure to currency risk that has dropped down significantly and as of January and February, it even dropped further because of the growth that we've seen in the other territory and the growth of the cash lending business. I'll explain that in a bit. We don't do cash lending yet in Nigeria.
We haven't started there. I'll explain that in a brief. If you look at 2019, almost 100% of our revenue used to come from airtime credit. That's what we used to do, data lending, airtime credit. MFS, which is cash lending, was 1.2%, and the top five countries generated 83%. Someone would say, "Yes, there was concentration risk, et cetera, the business was growing. It was very robust, we had exposure to foreign exchange." Fast-forward five years and look at how the picture looks right now. Airtime credit is 55%, yet it has grown, MFS is seeing significant growth. These are the microloans of $5, $10, $30, and in some countries, $50. You can see that the split is changing.
When you look at other countries are 17%, we've actually more than doubled now our expansion, meaning very little dependence on a single territory. What makes Optasia in terms of the revenue? What is airtime when we talk about airtime? We don't just say, "Oh, you've run out of airtime here, come borrow." No, there's a lot of science that goes behind it. We can predict with certainty what packages you would need based on behavior, based on historical data of 12 years that we carry on our platform. We then realize that sometimes you might need just a bridge for one day, sometimes you need to bridge for a week, et cetera. We develop different bundles and technologies that allows us to actually deliver what you need when you need.
I always like to give this example is when you go to a supermarket and try and do your shopping, you never actually write, "I want to buy chewing gum," or, "I want to buy Red Bull." It's just you pick it up at the counter because credit is impulsive. Same thing happens here. We catch you at the moment where you're running out of airtime, running out of data, and that's when we provide you the best offer at the best time, and we're very flexible. One of the key things we've developed, and that's the total credit limit. We give you a credit limit, and we allow you to do whatever you want with it, yet we're able to use our CVM capabilities to actually push the right offer at the right time that we know you would take.
Currently, we do 30 million decisions every single day. We advance to our customers. Microlending, I remember when I first did this presentation, was it five years ago or so? One of the things we said is we're going to develop the cash lending business, and everyone thought, "Oh, many people have tried. This doesn't work. That doesn't work." We very proud here to say that we've not only delivered, but we're actually heading to the stratosphere with what we're doing here. If you look at the growth of MFS just in the last 18 months to two years, this is growing at about 15% a month in terms of lending. It's outrageous growth, and we haven't even touched the tip of the iceberg. I have some data from World Bank on mobile money usage and so on.
I don't have it here, what do you think our target of growth for mobile money in Africa would be versus where we are today? For example, if you were drawing a business plan, you say you want to capture X% of market share. With the growth we have, how much do you think? Just throw a figure. What do you think we're aiming for in terms of growth, say, over the next, say, two, three years? 50. Currently, we're still at 0.1% market penetration with this growth, and our target is to hit 1% by next year. Just to tell you the opportunity that we have here, it's significant opportunity. You're talking about ZAR 950 billion going through the mobile money financial system here, and what we've done so far in 2024 is just the tip of the iceberg.
If you remember the slides before when I showed MFS was 1.2% in 2019, fast-forward five years and you see that data monetization is actually 1% today. This is going to grow and hopefully when we meet next, I will demonstrate this to you why this is going to be a very big growth area. What is this data monetization? What is it? We have all this data, yet we're using it for credit scoring, we're using it for cash lending, we're using it for the airtime, and so on. What we decided to look is are there opportunities here that same customer that actually borrows from us when they go to recharge their airtime credit, they need to find somewhere, an agent or somewhere to go and recharge.
What if we catch them at that moment they want to actually recharge and use different payment gateways to sell them the airtime or the recharge also and make a percentage. On one hand, we lend them when they need it, and when they come to top up again, we actually catch them because we know they have to top up. At that moment, we can actually provide them that gateway to be able to top up either by direct debit or take money from their mobile wallet, et cetera. We've deployed this now in Nigeria. It's in the testing phase, and currently in South Africa also, where in maybe the next four or five days, it'll go live in South Africa. Credit T-Score is credit score as a service.
You got very thin data files in many countries where you cannot really provide credit because of very thin files. What we do is we see ourselves providing that scoring that allows financial institutions insurance to sell funeral insurance or whatever it may be and provide them those credit scores, which is again here what I say XtraSure, which is enabling. There's another product in development now, which is called XtraSave, and this is something that there's a lot of money sitting in the mobile wallet that is not used. We want to offer customers a good interest rate on that money because today they earn nothing on it because the telcos are not allowed to charge, and therefore use that money to finance the pool for those that want to lend. This is something that we're currently developing. What is the airtime?
Just very quickly, I'm not going to go through this a lot. Here, you would see that despite the Naira, and I'm sure many of you knew that the Naira went from about 380 to 1,600 in under 18 months. This obviously had an impact in terms of the advances. Even with the drop, we still grew in terms of EBITDA. This just demonstrates the robustness of the business. Obviously, we continue to expand our MNOs. How does this actually work? You have a customer, they are running out of airtime. The platform actually sees this person is running out or you're in the middle of a call. We immediately pop you an offer. You accept it. You're pre-approved already.
You take the credit, and then once you're on your next top-up, you pay back that money plus a fee, and there's a revenue share between us and, in this case, the mobile operator. It sounds simple, but there's a lot of complexity, a lot of database reconciliations, et cetera, that goes behind the scene. With the microfinancing solutions, there are three partners. There is the wallet owner, and this doesn't have to be a mobile operator. This could be just a mobile wallet owner, could be like the Grab or bKash in Bangladesh or whatever. They're not a telco, they're just a mobile wallet owner. Could be a bank, could be a digital bank that also own mobile wallets, or could be a telco, which also has the mobile wallets. In this case, the fees are usually split into three.
If we lend ten and we make two, then two is split between us, the financial institution providing the balance sheet, and the mobile wallet owner. We underwrite the risk, but we don't use our balance sheet to do the lending. So far, it's worked brilliantly. We've never lost on any single deployment to date. We are not regulated, which is the beauty about us, because we sit as a technology provider. The product is regulated by the telco or the central bank. When we're doing cash lending in a country, it's the bank that applies for the product, and once that product is approved by the central bank, we then can launch that product in that country. We are not regulated by any way, shape, or form. How do we do this? How do we create this?
I'd love to give some insight into the type of data that we have. We collect, on average per customer, 100,000 data points. 100,000. The most relevant are usually around 5,000 data points. It's not only about the 5,000 data points that actually creates a score, but it's actually the behavior and how those data points interlink with each other. That creates about further 2,000 data points that actually create about 90% of the credit score of the customers. If you look at our net default rates, they are incredibly low, yet we continuously grow. If we take Pakistan, for example, where currently we lend at about ZAR 2 million a day currently in Pakistan. Three years ago, we were lending ZAR 300,000, ZAR 400,000. The actual defaults have actually improved, even though we've grown five or six times in Pakistan.
This is just a testament to the historical data and the behavior that we're able to analyze, which continuously either keeps steady or drops the default rates. There is a lot of funding partners out there that want to work with us for the very simple reason there is no other way for them to reach their consumers or retail banking, if you like, in these territories without us at a zero cost almost. If you take a lady in Bangladesh or in Pakistan in a rural village, or even any other country, then she needs to borrow money to buy textiles and sew it and sell it on the market, for her to drive to a bank is 100 km away. She needs four guarantors from the community, fill up endless paperwork, and maybe or maybe not, she gets the credit.
There's a lot of shark lenders out there that could do it quicker, it's not sustainable. What we've been able to do is to provide sustainable lending, instantaneous lending, unsecure, to their phone straight away and be able to actually borrow, pay back, this is why I said you have the same repeat customers coming back all the time to the platform. The loans are very short-term. We must remember that these loans are going to millions and millions of people. We're talking about ZAR 5, ZAR 10, ZAR 3, and so on. One of the products that we see accelerating like crazy is called the overdraft, which is also could be used as buy now, pay later.
It's in development where we want to put this into the stores like Jumia or some of the stores in South Africa, where when you go in, you can use Optasia to check out, and we provide you a credit instantly, and we guarantee the payment to the e-commerce site. This is something that's pretty unique and has not been done really in the emerging markets as such. If you look at just data, I spoke about 5,000 data elements that will create 100,000 features. This data is completely unstructured. In fact, when we do receive data from telcos and financial institutions, we find a lot of errors in it. Our quality assurance data scientists go back and correct the data to the telcos. We actually tell them there's errors here and so on, and to their surprise, they're like, "Oh, okay." The data's always wrong.
Imagine they have this data, but it's actually completely unstructured. What we're able to do is we're able to take all of this and make sense out of this. It comes into our AI profiling engine, which trains itself. We have bespoke scorecards that are done three months usually after a deployment. A few years after we started, it used to take us three to four months to develop a scorecard. Today with AI, we do it in 48 hours. That's the difference in our ability to deploy. These training models create the propensity models. We also have fraud models. We've seen some countries, people try to borrow and pay back because they want to increase their score. The system picks up on it, and we actually ban them from the platform, or we educate them because finance is about also education in this place.
We always tell people, of course, if you pay quicker, you can be eligible. We teach them because finance is very new to these peoples. Creates the risk model, which creates our outstanding prediction model, and the cycle continuously rotates. The issue here is not about only the credit score, but actually, it's about the total credit limit because you can create a credit score for someone, but in reality, what does that actually mean? We give you a credit limit and overdraft, like a credit card, you got a ZAR 50,000 credit on it, or ZAR 10,000, et cetera. This is what we do. We're able to provide that credit limit, which our financial partners are very comfortable with. Just here very quickly.
One of the things we have done internally is that if you look at this chart here on the top, this is the fees that we charge. If you look at this here, this is our defaults. You get to a stage whereby you need to find the optimal point for revenue and profits, yet continue to be a socially responsible lender. We can actually create more defaults and make a lot more money, but that's not what we're about. We don't do this. That's why when you look at the blue line, the inverted bell there, you see that the optimal point is there, which is where we make sure the defaults are their absolute minimum, where it's still profitable for us. We're not creating defaults that will start dig into our revenues.
As you can see, the more risk you go, the more lending you go, the more your risk actually goes up, and eventually, your fees will equal your defaults, and therefore, we're back to square zero. Which is not something we would like to do. This is just a deployment example. The defaults decline with time, which is incredible because you have the same customers that are actually repeating, borrowing larger amounts, so the ratio of default drops as a ratio of the total lending. I don't know if I need to explain this. The story has been really, really amazing. If you look at this, if not for the currency depreciations, for example, in Nigeria at the time, mainly Nigeria, Zambia, some of these countries, and Ghana, the growth would have been even way more. Even with that, we still grew.
Obviously you can see that our EBITDA grows with our revenue because these are not linear in our business. We're a technology business, and therefore our EBITDA can grow faster than our revenue, especially when you look at the MFS, whereby the take rates are a lot higher. If you look at this on a constant currency basis versus the previous, you can see the growth that we would have achieved. That's a good thing in a way because it gives us visibility to see how our business is performing. That means the fundamentals are very strong. Now that we have less dependence on some of the markets where the volatility is not there as much, we expect to have that continuous high-margin growth, high-margin EBITDA. Continue to grow again.
One of the most important thing is, we're only going to speak about our January and February because we're not going to give a forecast. If you just look at this, our EBITDA grew in January. If you look backwards, we're growing the EBITDA $3 million in January and another $3 million again in February. This growth is tremendous, and it's coming mainly from our cash lending business. I spoke about the ESG. This is, for example, a lady that wants to borrow short-term finance for medications. She can use our XtraCash products. This gentleman here is trying to do a transaction online to purchase something, doesn't have enough money in their mobile wallet. We see that. We can pick it up. We provide them an overdraft on the spot, and we guarantee the merchant.
This is XtraFloat, meaning when you go on the streets and try and buy airtime or similar, people run out of. Because also they're limited. These traders are limited. We now want to provide credit to the retailers, some SMEs, to say, "Here's an amount of float of airtime. You can sell it to 10,000 people if you like. Then in the evening after you sell, you come back and you pay us." We're enabling those SMEs, those individuals, street sellers, et cetera. One thing we really pride ourselves on is that though we are a profitable business, we always make sure that we are a completely responsible lender.
One of the things that from day one is that we realize if we do not do this responsibly, we will have no business because we will simply burn the base, and we do not want to be seen as a shark lender. In every country that we lend, we actually lend at rates which are far lower than what the regulators allow. Far lower. This way, people are not actually falling victims to predatory lending from sharks and villages and so on, which they can't really pay back. This is something that we focus on. We keep the cost very low for borrowing, not only from the interest that they pay, but actually the process itself, digital delivery, there's equal access, there's no differentiation between gender. It's really based on your score.
This is why you see, I think it was 37% of our users currently that borrow from us are female. In many territories where we operate, actually, females are at the forefront of SMEs trading and distribution. I'm happy to take your questions. If you remember what I said initially, we build all our, call them clouds, but within the actual territory. Our cloud is behind the firewall of the data owner. It never really leaves the country. When you now want to borrow, you have to accept the T&Cs. Okay? You get an SMS or USSD or any of these channels, and you say, okay, you agree to the terms and conditions that we use your data to create credit scores for you. That data is never sold to anyone. Absolutely never to anyone. There's two parts of the data.
There's the raw data, which is your information, your phone number, your KYC, et cetera. Then there is the scoring data, which belongs to us 100%. We apply the GDPR rules. We comply with the POPI Act in South Africa and all the other countries. Yeah. Sorry, I can't. It's about 3%. 3% on average. That's for the cash lending. On the airtime credit, it's far less. It's like 1%.
The contracts that you have with your mobile networks and the banks, what are the contracts that you've lost where they've tried to replicate and to compete with you effectively? What's happened in that situation? Have they come back? Has anyone managed to solve it and compete effectively with you in market?
Actually, there's two things. One, the mobile operators tried at once, they saw the money and they thought, "We're going to try and do this in-house." I'm talking 2016 to 2018, those two years. At that stage, there were two operators that decided to do it in-house. Fine. They went ahead. We refused to budge on reducing revenue, doing all that, so they went. They burned their base and we started working with other mobile operators in that same market, and then they did come back to us. That discussion about doing it internally has really stopped from 2018, 2019. We don't hear it anymore in the market. On the other side, there were some smaller companies that were coming out there trying to do the same thing like we do. They didn't invest in the scoring technologies or the capabilities that we have.
They have no AI, no algorithms, no machine learning, no data scientists. They use simple business rules. This is what I was saying earlier when I started, that's what we used in 2012, and we went and plateaued very quickly. We didn't see any more growth because the business rules were limiting the growth because it's not science, really. You see a lot of these smaller companies have actually fallen off the cliff to the extent, and I say it humbly, we're actually being selective in the customers that we choose now. If a customer that we see from the business case does not generate to us below a certain amount a year, we simply don't go for it.
We have that leverage because now we might not be known on the consumer side, but within that industry, within the telco, and within the financial industry, we're extremely well-known company. There's no threat from that.
Okay. Within the microloans, that fee-sharing arrangement between the three parties, has that remained relatively consistent across markets? In airtime lending, the squeeze was on initially from 50/50 to where it is today. Where are we in the microloan market, and where's most of the economics reside between the three parties?
There's two models for the revenue. There's a model where the bank shares the risk with us, so there is a profit share, not a revenue share. This is in Pakistan, for example. That's only because the largest telco we work with owns the bank also, and therefore, there is a tripartite profit-sharing. We take the default from the top and we share the profits one third each. In most of the other countries, it's a banking facility. We put a small bank guarantee, and they give us 90% on top of that, and then we just pay finance costs to the financial institution, and most of the revenue share goes between us and the mobile operators. The mobile operators or the wallet owners actually earn their money in two ways. Either on the revenue share or a fee per transaction.
They take a fee when we disburse and a fee when we recover. It's very different to the airtime credit because we can actually play with the level of profitability we want to make because we're not limited by the telco sharing with them or by the bank. We can decide how much really profit we want to make. Again, as I said, we want to remain cautious that responsible lending is the key here. It's not about the short-term profitability, because we can make a lot of money in the short term, but we'll have no base because we're going to burn that base.
Hi, a question from my side just on maybe markets that haven't worked. You've got a very impressive list of current countries. I think I saw Saudi Arabia in the beginning. Maybe it's smaller in the mix, it's not singled out.
Saudi Arabia?
Yeah.
Yeah.
maybe just countries that maybe haven't worked, and then maybe just also the countries that you are most excited about on a five-year view.
On the cash lending, every single country has worked. On the airtime credit, every single country has worked, but maybe not to our satisfaction. There were a few countries that we actually had to take as part of a group deal. We couldn't say no because, okay, take MTN, they want us to launch in Eswatini and South Sudan. What can we do? We have a group contract for 18 countries, and they keep putting pressure on us. We know it doesn't work as much in these countries. Same with Ooredoo Group. They ask us to do Bahrain and Kuwait. Tiny countries, so we do little investment there. It's not that the country doesn't work, it's the size of the mobile operator. If you don't work with a tier 1 mobile operator, or worst case, a tier 2, you cannot really be successful in this.
Once you go for tier 3, it's high churn. They have 30%, 40% churn, et cetera. The trick is always to remain with the tier 1 and tier 2 distributors, or mobile operators in the territory.
Thanks. There we go. maybe just the country you're most excited or regions you're most excited about over the next-
Asia.
Asia.
Asia. Asia is going to be huge. In a few years, if we do this presentation, you're going to see something completely different here. In Africa, you've got 220 million mobile wallets, more or less. Without telcos into consideration in Asia, you almost have that just with mobile wallet owners that we haven't tapped into yet. We haven't started lending. We've just now put the teams together and attacking that region. Asia is a huge growth, and the amount of money that you can lend into the wallet because of the GDP is a lot higher than what you can do. I'm not saying there's no growth in Africa. There's huge, tremendous growth in Africa. As I mentioned already before, we're just at 0.1%, but the scale of how this business could grow is just unimaginable at them.
We need to manage our resources well and go for the quick land-grabbing opportunities here, which are right in front of us.
I have a question. If you go to any market, like Asia as a case in point, how relevant is the data that you've gathered from other countries, let's say in Africa, to start off with? Is there a learning curve in country that's specific to that country or region?
The data is slightly different, what the team has been able to do is to create those generic scorecards and use the champion-challenger models. Before we go in and launch in a country, we collect 12 months-24 months of data before we even launch. That data goes into our AI platform, and it takes a couple of days to run it, and they then check against the business case whether they were right in terms of their prediction models. Usually, they're within 3%, it's really very good. That only happens for the first three months because it's not optimal. Here, we're talking about potentially looking what is the probability of default. What happens is within three months of launch, the AI model would have trained itself, and then we're able to launch every two weeks a scorecard to continuously improve.
I'm not going to mention a name, but three weeks ago, on a Friday, 6:00 P.M., I got a call from a very big client of mine, and he was like, "I'm desperate for revenue. I'm closing my books. I've got seven days to close my books. What can you do to increase my revenue right now?" It's Friday, 6:00 P.M. I call my guys in the office and I say, "Guys, I have this request. We need to now act very quickly. We need to see how we can push distribution and all of that." By 8:00 P.M., they rang me and they said, "Okay, we can do A, B, C, D, and E. We just need to engage the platform very quickly." By midnight, we had launched a new scorecard for that customer, make sure they reach their revenue target.
It's just the speed at which we can act and the speed at which the platform can actually operate is just mind-blowing. You had a question, I think. Yeah.
The U.S. is an opportunity, I suppose, will be able to.
U.S. is actually an excellent prepaid market in the U.S. There's also a business in the U.S., which I wouldn't say it's comparable, but it's called Upstart, but they do it only with the banks. They lend a couple of hundred dollars through banks and so on. Huge defaults. They have huge defaults. They haven't been able to get it right. We probably know why they haven't got it right, but the U.S. is definitely a market that we need to look at. Again, I'm wary not to stretch ourselves because right now we have a lot of opportunities in the pipe in front of us, and I want to make sure that we grab those opportunities.
What's your staff turnover like?
In the technology department at the mid-management and higher level, zero. On the lower developers part, it is about 10% a year.
How do you protect the proprietary nature of-
These developers are in cells. That is how it is structured. The worst thing they can do is take a piece of the cake, which means nothing. There is nothing they can do with that. The core technology sits with five people, and I constantly update the IP, and I keep it off premises in a very secure location also.
That core five people, obviously well.
They're all shareholders also in the business. They are part and parcel of the company. They are mainly the technology people themselves, they have long-term incentive plans and all of that. No one person can also take that. Even if someone in the scoring takes that, what are you going to do with the scoring? You don't have the relationships. You don't have the financing. You don't have the country knowledge. It's what I said, you can have something, but it doesn't mean it's going to work.
You maybe just touched on the cash repatriation out of these countries, some of these countries, and your cash conversion and if you have challenges around repatriation.
Of course there are some challenges, there's never been a country where we've never been able to take our money from. For example, in Pakistan, it's a tough country, there's two things that we're doing now. It's growing so fast, we keep kind of the money into the country and engage it to make more money. Then every four or five months in a bulk, we apply to the central bank and collect our profits. We do it twice a year because it's a cumbersome process. Couple of the other countries, Bangladesh is also similar. Generally in the African countries, with the exception of Ethiopia or Sudan, there's not a lot of difficulties. We're not facing a lot of difficulties taking money out from the country.
Our receivables actually are well under the 60 days, except for the ones that we decide to expand. I'll give you a simple example. We should distort the picture, but it's not the real picture. We launched in Benin Republic about seven months ago, eight months ago. There has been such huge uptake on the service that the bank had given us $6 million facility. That facility was consumed in two months, therefore, we continuously keep our money that we generate now in Benin Republic, where I think on the 10th month, we are generating revenue of $2 million and $1 million profit a month on average, just in Benin Republic. We've kept now our whole float, nine months of float in the country. We don't take it out because we want to continuously grow the business. We don't need that liquidity.
Maybe just an observation on Latin America. There's only one little flag there at the moment.
Latin America is tough. It's a well-banked environment. On the airtime credit, it's a bundle and value market. I'm not saying there's no growth and opportunities, but if I were to prioritize countries, I would say Africa, Asia, Middle East, then Latin America. As we are only in 42 countries, I would rather put all our energy and resources on the land-grabbing opportunities that we have.
Didn't you say that SA, right on the same page, it's also well-banked, but yet it seemed to have been quite a success for you in the business?
If you look at the cash lending in SA, it is small still, but the airtime is massive. That's different. That doesn't require the same banking. SA is not a bundle market like it is in Latin America. That's what makes the difference. SA has been a huge success story. If you realize, it's public information that even with Vodacom, we do 47% of their distribution currently. With MTN, it's like 38%.
Any, Bassim?
All right. Thank you. Feel free, I'm around if anyone wants any more questions or discussion.
Thank you. Excellent. Thank you, Bassim. Thanks so much. There'll now be just some stuff for the guys to eat, and we're all going to be around. Feel free to engage, ask questions, and thank you again for being here today. We appreciate it. Thank you