AI-Crafted Financial Identities Aid World Bank 2020 Inclusion Goals

When Warner Brothers acquired movie discovery site, Flixster, and its reviews site, Rotten Tomatoes, in 2011, its President and COO, Steve Polsky, set out to explore how scoring consumer behavior data from mobile activity could be leveraged to solve a growing global financial crisis, one where two-thirds of the world's population have been excluded from transacting in the digital economy because they lack formal financial identity. To address this problem, Polsky founded Juvo to serve as a data-driven micro-financing provider that uses machine learning to extend emergency airtime loans to prepaid phone users when they run low on their balance. As customers make timely payments, they unlock access to progressively larger loans and build credit that they can use to qualify for a credit card and other financial instruments. Inspired by the World Bank challenge to achieve Universal Financial Access for a billion people by 2020, this San Francisco-based Series B startup has raised $54 million with rounds led by NEA and Wing, and strategic partnerships with Samsung NEXT, Nokia, Cable & Wireless and other leading mobile operators around the world. At the heart of their offerings is the data set they're mining which boasts over 5.6 billion data points being constructed real time for over 250 million people daily across 26 countries and 4 continents.