Co-creating resilience at ARTH
ARTH Foundation is a nonprofit group company of ARTH, a fintech with the objective to improve access to microcredit and livelihood enhancing services. ARTH provides access to credit to micro-enterprises that are first-time formal borrowers, thus enabling financial inclusion & driving large scale impact using advanced technology; to address the three key objectives:
Micro-entrepreneurship Empowerment
Livelihood Enhancement
Hyper-Local Economy Development
Over the last few years, while engaging with micro-entrepreneurs, we found out that in addition to limited access to financial services, there have been various other livelihood challenges prevalent in this segment that needed to be addressed. This formed the basis of the way we operate today, with a greater focus on deeper customer engagement and strengthening the livelihoods of communities in the states of Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Haryana.
With the COVID crisis dominating the year, our basis remained the same, and ARTH through its Foundation continued to engage with its customers and co-create relevant solutions to build social resilience in absorbing the economic shocks of micro-businesses during the pandemic. Various engagement and communication tools were implemented to ensure every customer got connected, ranging from technologically led ARTH Chatbot- to telephonic conversations; traditional text messaging to the much trending zoom video calls.
While using these technologies for our customers, we realized that some of our members were finding it difficult to adopt our tech-driven solution. To overcome this, the ARTH Foundation offered individual assistance from a dedicated resource — SPM who provided the necessary hand-holding support for the implementation of the chatbot, as well as habituating women to use these effective methodologies. This one-to-one approach further helped us in enabling the use of technology for our customers.
While we continue to build on new offerings for the post-COVID times to support the livelihoods of households, we have concluded that it is extremely important to invest in strengthening the relationship with micro customers to understand the changing needs and adaptability of customers to better evolve on the solution being offered.
For more information: https://arthdigital.net/
