Ké Concepts looks to Ghana

BUSINESS

SA-based Ké Concepts is focusing more heavily on Ghana’ s financial sector as it expands its market in Africa. The company focuses on credit management and lending solutions tailored for the African market.

Ké Concepts has been working with clients in Africa since 2002 and haa been operating in the Ghanaian financial sector since 2006.  Currently, clients include microfinanciers such as African Financial Services (AFS) and other Ghana-based premier financial services providers.  

“ Ghana is a logical choice for a number of our clients,” explains Miles Hern, Managing Director at Ké Concepts. “ Its stable economic and political climate is attracting a lot of interest and we’ ve been doing our part to bring top-class credit management solutions to the country.”

According to Hern, Africa as a whole is showing good recovery from the recent economic slump, with consumer spending picking up. This has created a need for quality credit management solutions as individuals seek to improve circumstances and take advantage of optimistic economic climates, he says.

“ Getting the right infrastructures in place to provide a stable and reliable service can be expensive and time consuming.  The remoteness of some locations can make it difficult to penetrate effectively into certain areas and provide acceptable service levels.

He says many IT solutions, particularly those developed for American or European markets, have been designed to operate in a first-world environment.  

“ Unfortunately these don’ t always translate well into an African context,” Hern says.

To meet the needs of business in Africa,  Ké Concepts has modified its management solution to enable off-line functionality, providing solid performance even in the absence of a stable connection.

“ Many of our existing customers in this market are providing loans to salaried employees, many of whom are working outside of city centres. We paid particular attention to our origination and disbursement modules so that credit can be approved and disbursed even when off-line, which are the most critical areas in terms of customer-facing interactions,” says Hern.

Ké ’ s solutions are available on a subscription basis, despite bandwidth eccentricities. This makes their solutions easily accessible as there is no need for large capital expenditure in extensive infrastructures and software licensing.

This delivery model also offers a number of business benefits.  The service is delivered out of a world-class data centre in Johannesburg allowing companies based in African locales such as Ghana to leverage first-world technologies for their service delivery. Easy to deploy, short to-market lead times, and affordable pay-per-user pricing models are making Ké ’ s solutions extremely attractive to Ghanaian lenders, says Hern.  In addition this enables Ké to provide support without having physical presence in the respective countries.

“ Ké ’ s ability to adapt so effectively has enabled our African clients to really gain a foothold in areas that have been inaccessible until now for great market penetration,” says Hern.  “ We are really looking forward to facilitating future growth and engaging more and more in these markets.”