Juvo, a pioneer of financial identities for the underbanked, has today announced a strategic partnership with DOCOMO Digital, the preeminent mobile commerce enabler. The partnership will focus on combining Juvo’s financial identity and credit lending capabilities with DOCOMO Digital’s class-leading payments platform for mobile carriers, OTTs and digital merchants. This partnership would enable increased financial flexibility for prepaid mobile users, especially in the emerging markets, as consumption of digital services and OTT content continues to rise. 

DOCOMO Digital partners with over 200 mobile operators and over 300 digital merchants and as many payment providers to make mobile commerce a frictionless experience. Consumers can choose to pay for digital services as part of their post-paid phone bills or use their pre-paid balances to do so. However, consumers in emerging markets often abandon their purchases either due to insufficient pre-paid balances or ready access to conventional payment methods such as credit cards. This partnership between Juvo and DOCOMO Digital would now allow for such transactions to be completed with micro-credits extended instantaneously, and without the need for consumers to top-up immediately.

Juvo’s technology leverages previously untapped data sources, including network, application and repayment data, to build financial identities and establish credit worthiness for unknown and underbanked consumers. Based on these financial identities, Juvo helps service providers (operators, financial institutions, and merchants) better understand creditworthiness and offer credit so that more transactions can be approved. Juvo’s partnership also allows providers to offer rich content and financial services that weren’t previously available to customers without credit.

 “Our partnership with Juvo aligns perfectly with our endeavour to make the mobile commerce experience seamless for consumers, while unlocking more value for mobile operators and digital merchants. While access to mobile and data services is growing rapidly in the emerging markets, the access to conventional financial services has not kept up. Together with Juvo, we can provide more financial flexibility to mobile subscribers in these markets,” said Jonathan Kriegel, DOCOMO Digital’s CEO, while commenting on this development.

 “Juvo’s mission is to create the YES Economy, creating financial identities for the 68% of adults worldwide who are locked out of the formal economy due to lack of credit history,” said Steve Polsky, founder and CEO of Juvo. “By creating financial identities, Juvo empowers our partners with the data to say YES to more of their customers, opening up new revenue streams. Our partnership with DOCOMO Digital is an important step in this, and we look forward to collaborating on products that have the potential to change and evolve the mobile payment and commerce industry.”