Financial literacy and customer facing skills help the growing small and medium enterprise (SME) customer base become more financially savvy and successful.
Customer: Carbon (a digital bank with over 650,000 customers), Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana
THE CHALLENGE
The management team at Carbon recognized early on that empowering their SME customers with higher levels of financial literacy and business skills would help the SMEs become better entrepreneurs. The resulting trust and loyalty would build the Carbon brand and differentiate them from the competitors.
THE SOLUTION
Carbon uses a mobile-first and data-driven approach to providing financial solutions to their mobile savvy employees and customers. The BigSpring learning platform was a natural choice for Carbon, because it blends an easy-to-use learning experience across mobile and web, along with deep analytics. Within days, Carbon was able to roll out its portfolio of skills - sourced from custom content and the BigSpring Universal Library.
THE OUTCOME
SME proprietors have found the financial literacy training content to be extremely valuable. Due to the positive response, Carbon now offers it as a standard benefit.
Supporting SME customers every step of the way
- Every SME customer is offered financial literacy training as part of the loan application process; most go on to complete all training modules despite this being an optional step in the process.
- Skills such as Responsible Borrowing, Saving Money, Monthly Budgeting, etc., help the SME leaders maintain a healthy financial standing for their businesses, which range from salons to cafes.
- SMEs are extending the learning to their own employees by empowering them with content from the BigSpring Universal Library such as customer service and communications skills.
- Additionally, using smartphones and BigSpring’s Content Playbook, SME leaders also have the ability to easily create and deploy their own customized video content on BigSpring.
- The combination of training and finance is clearly quite impactful, as Carbon have reported seeing returning SME customers that have grown their revenues since they started with Carbon, and this has meant they were able to access additional finance on their return.
“App is easy to use and I really found the content to be relevant and educating me to manage my funds well, thanks for the opportunity of getting trained on something new.”
“My experience on the platform was so smooth and the content was straight on point.”
“I really liked the examples shared in the videos, they are so relatable that I could even identify the mistakes I have been doing in the past.”
- SME Proprietors
“We currently use BigSpring for our small and medium sized enterprises in a variety of ways: to onboard our customers to learn more about Carbon, but also to teach them about financial literacy and other skills that they may be lacking. We are now rolling it out as a standard benefit to all customers, and it’s been extremely well received.”
- Ngozi Dozie, Co-founder, Carbon
