K'e Concepts, local developer of the innovative CreditEase Instalment credit solution, has made significant inroads into the African continent in the three months since launching its CreditEase Online ASP offering.
It has been just three months since K'e Concepts launched CreditEase Online through Korbi.net and already its distribution reach has expanded to include Zambia, Botswana and Swaziland. The significant increases in flexibility of deployment and reduced cost of implementation and support in the ASP environment have attracted the attention of instalment credit vendors (ICVs) operating on the African continent.
Leading ICT market analyst BMI-TechKnowlege forecasts that South Africans will spend R321 million for ASP services by the year 2003 up from R35 million in the year 2000 (South African ASP Market Assessment, BMI-T, 2000). Overall, this represents a compounded growth rate of 118% over the three-year forecast. Some 66% of this growth is expected in the enterprise segment alone, all of which bodes well for South African ASPs like CreditEase Online.
The challenge for small banks, office automation specialists and micro-lenders throughout Africa has been that they tend to have their offices widely dispersed. For many financial managers in these enterprises it is a daily struggle to evaluate and report on the current financial status of all the branches cumulatively. Gaining critical information such as the amount of business written in a specific month or even the value of the loans outstanding takes several days to compile before the hassle of distributing them to the correct people. Branch managers are unable to gain an accurate picture of the profitability of their cost centres in time to make effective decisions.
Historically K'e Concepts customers have been faced with trying to reduce the length of time it takes to authorise loans (cycle time), reducing paperwork, manage collection of loans and improving office-to-field communications. These branches have also needed to maintain a small corporate and IT infrastructure. Technology of any kind has not been available to field users and therefore they continue to rely on inefficient paper-based processes.
"An ASP offering has proved to be just what the doctor ordered," said Merlin Knott, head of sales at K'e. "ICVs have snapped up the opportunity to solve their problems with a cost-effective, online solution," he added.
CreditEase Online`s end-to-end e-business solutions and Microsoft Office productivity software are available real-time through the Internet, requiring only a dial-up connection. This real-time processing reduces the credit risk of manual systems and tracks contract processes allowing clients to rapidly implement a nationwide, cutting-edge technology solution without a major investment in hardware, networking infrastructure, and large IT staffing.
CreditEase provides online collaboration between branch managers, corporate offices and the banks. This functionality is key to the solution. Instead of weekly meetings to review the status of loans, CreditEase Online gives all parties real-time access to the current data. Problems can be identified and resolved immediately. In addition, CreditEase Online replaces much of the branch manager`s daily paperwork, allowing him to spend more time focusing on the customer needs instead of those daily "hassles and headaches".
Being able to support CreditEase from a central location has improving service delivery and support levels to the ASP clients. In addition, ASP users have no need to manage and maintain their own complicated IT infrastructure and receive world-class data security through offsite hosting at UUNET`s data centre.
At this stage approximately 110 field offices connect to CreditEase Online through PCs and laptop Web browsers.
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