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With Brazil leading on agri-fintech innovation, how is this sector improving finance for farmers, and what milestones are on the horizon to push adoption at scale? Two entrepreneurs making waves on the global stage give an overview.
Fabricio Pezente, Co-Founder & CEO, TRAIVE:
Why do farmers need innovation in fintech?
Agriculture is one of the least digitized industries across the entire supply chain, which creates a lot of friction and adds cost to the financiers. Incremental innovation, such as automation of manual processes, added to more disruptive ones, such as AI applied to credit risk assessments and decision-making, would certainly attract more investors to the sector and drive down costs, improving farmers’ margins and financing experience.
As your product rolls out, what adoption are you seeing with farmers?
We have a B2B2C model, where the agricultural input distributors are the users of our technology. As our product increases adoption, farmers are directly impacted by having a more streamlined decision, added to an individualized credit assessment that can lead to more access to capital. The main impact on farmers’ behavior is to understand the need to share more quality data to improve their perception by the capital markets.
What will success look like to you, what are you trying to achieve, and how will you know you got there?
Financial products must be an enabler of prosperity for farmers and not a constraint on their ability to produce more and better. Our ultimate goal is to allow farmers to have access to a comprehensive platform of financial products offered by a variety of players and fueled by data intelligence. This starts with credit propelling data acquisition and risk models validation, besides building an user experience that the sector has not yet been offered by tech companies.
Matheus Ganem, CEO, SEEDZ:
Why do farmers need innovation in fintech?
Farmers are missing opportunity to increase their production because of the lack of new source of fund to finance their business. The dynamics of the cash flow business requires financers to understand some type of data that goes beyond the traditional math of credit. Particularly in Brazil, competitive prices, coupled with BRL depreciation, led to higher grain production, drastically increasing demand for credit in the sector.
As your product rolls out, what adoption are you seeing with farmers?
Farmers are risk takers by nature. They “plant” their money every year in a hope to get back months later following the not certain success of the harvest. If they see a technology that works they will adopt. We are experiencing a 300% CAGR (compound annual growth rate) over 3 years of new farmers as active users in our platform surpassing over 100k active today.
What will success look like to you, what are you trying to achieve, and how will you know you got there?
Our mission is to connect those who are feeding the world. We work every day so we can bring a technology that helps the farmers to do better business and deals but also the industry that funds, buy or sell product and services to them to also improve their business. There is not an “end” for that like the farmers life, we must delivey a better “harvest” every season. And people will always need a better and more sustainable food at their table year over year.
Continue the conversation with Fabricio, Matheus and more fintech-focused corporates, investors and innovators at the World Agri-Tech South America Summit on June 20-21, in São Paulo.