Juvo partners with Mastercard to help underbanked consumers in LATAM

By Pavithra R

California based Juvo, a Financial Identity as a Service (FiDaaS) provider has announced entering into a new partnership with Mastercard to provide financial services to underbanked consumers in Latin America. Last August, Juvo was accepted into Mastercard’s global FinTech startup engagement program, Start Path. The firm is now collaborating with Mastercard’s Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) team to introduce its FiDaaS platform to hundreds of financial institutions (FIs) across the region. 

“Mastercard’s Start Path program identifies the best and brightest later stage fintech startups – Juvo is firmly in this category. We work with fintecxhs to co-innovate and uncover opportunities to drive the next generation of commerce, payment & fintech solutions between Mastercard and banking and commerce partners. We have been very impressed by Juvo’s track record of delivery to mobile and banking customers, and the innovation, robustness and suitability of its FiDaaS platform,” said Amy Neale, Senior Vice President, Mastercard. 

Juvo uses everyday mobile transactions to bring the world’s underbanked population into the formal financial system. Its FiDaaS platform analyzes mobile network data to build financial identities for the 68% of adults worldwide with no formal credit history. These alternative credit identities open a new world of financial opportunities for underbanked consumers. The FiDaaS platform processes billions of data points each day and is currently live in 27 countries on four continents. Its technology arms FIs with the insights they need to increase the addressable market for financial services, attracting new customers, while managing lending risk.

Across LATAM several millions of people are outside the reach of traditional credit bureaus, resulting in lack of meaningful data on which FIs can make decisions about who they serve. The result is that the majority of LATAM and Caribbean consumers remain underbanked, and the addressable market for FIs across the region is drastically reduced.

“We have hundreds of financial institutions, retailers and fintechs as customers across Latin America and the Caribbean. Juvo’s FiDaaS platform can help every one of them grow – it has excellent market fit. The traditional credit bureau system works well in developed countries, but across LAC lack of credit data restricts access to vital financial services for hundreds of millions of credit-worthy people. Using alternative data, FiDaaS provides financial institutions the information they need to make critical business decisions. In turn, these insights will open access to financial services for huge swathes of the population, supporting the drive for financial inclusion,” said Thiago Dias, VP FinTech Strategy and Labs, LAC, Mastercard. 

“Over the last 6 years, we’ve proven the reliability of the FiDaaS platform by offering mobile phone users in developing markets more than $1 billion in microloans for mobile airtime. That was important in helping to perfect the FiDaaS platform but make no mistake, this deal with Mastercard represents a huge step towards the achievement of our vision for Juvo. Financial institutions across LAC face a dilemma: consumers can’t demonstrate their creditworthiness to gain access to credit. Without access to credit, however, consumers can’t establish creditworthiness. Using FiDaaS, financial institutions can rapidly and dramatically expand the addressable market for their services while minimizing risk. Banks face new competitive pressures and commodification of transactional services, and they need to unlock new addressable markets and deliver new services. We believe that establishing reliable, secure financial identities for underbanked consumers is the key to solving this problem,” said Steve Polsky, founder and CEO of Juvo.

Recently, Mastercard announced modernizing business payments by adding A2A payments functionality.

Established since 1966, Mastercard is a global technology company in the payments industry. The firm is committed to building a more inclusive digital economy that works for everyone.