Yoma Bank taps Experian to make lending more accessible in Myanmar

Yoma Bank, one of the largest private banks in Myanmar, together with Experian, is revolutionising and making unsecured lending more accessible in Myanmar with the enhancement of its Smart Credit solution.

Smart Credit is the first product of its kind in Myanmar to offer unsecured loans to mass market customers and will help provide greater financial access to the country’s unbanked population.

Using Yoma Bank’s mobile banking app — which the bank says is fast, agile and scalable — customers can apply for unsecured personal loans through Experian’s Digital Onboarding platform. Approval decisions are processed by Experian’s Decisioning engine.

The engine parses real-time requests based credit scores and provides associated credit decisions for micro-lending requests. It draws from a range of data sources that are unique to developing markets such as Myanmar, combining data from the customer’s mobile operator, historical banking data, demographics and self-reported data.

The Smart Credit loan application platform is designed to put the customer in control of their own credit decision-making, with each approval based on the customer’s individual banking, savings and transaction behaviour.

“Our partnership with Yoma Bank reinforces our focus on responsible lending, expanding lender visibility and improving credit access,” said Dev Dhiman, Experian’s managing director for Southeast Asia and emerging markets.

“The Smart Credit solution represents an innovation in a market like Myanmar with limited public data on clients or businesses available, and is the first product of its kind to pioneer access to unsecured loans for consumers in a convenient and automated manner at scale,” he said.

The Smart Credit solution eliminates tedious paperwork, enabling loan applications to be completed in just minutes. The platform has enabled Yoma Bank to acquire 1,100 new retail banking customers a day — up from 500 a day six months ago.

The customer acquisition growth has been 120% within the first six months of the launch of the solution. Within three months, customers are averaging 15 transactions a month across Yoma Bank’s products.