Tarfin CEO Mehmet Memcan. Photo Credit: Tarfin

Enabling fair finance for Turkey’s farmers

How Tarfin is reinventing point-of-sale lending

“It’s a real achievement for Tarfin’s engineering team to have built such accurate risk-scoring models that it has a default rate of less than 2%.”

Tarfin is already deploying some impressive machine learning that delivers a real-time risk-scoring decision at the point of sale. Some 90% of financing decisions are made this way, with no human involved, and as the system develops and gathers more data points, that will become 100%. It’s a real achievement for Tarfin’s engineering team to have built such accurate risk-scoring models that it has a default rate of less than 2%. Farmers can finance their purchases up to $6,000 through Tarfin, though the average is $1,100, and repay once they harvest, linking repayment to a moment in time where the farmer has cash income.

“It’s his ambition that makes Mehmet so compelling — he’s a really good guy with a profound knowledge of his market and creating a huge opportunity.”

Yet from the moment I met Mehmet, I was convinced he had the tenacity and depth of experience to open up this sector. Tarfin plans to expand into a new regional market in 2021, and will then begin expansion further afield in markets that have similar dynamics. It’s his ambition that makes Mehmet so compelling — he’s a really good guy with a profound knowledge of his market and creating a huge opportunity. Finding all three together is pretty rare.

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Quona Capital is a venture firm specializing in financial technology for inclusion in emerging markets. Learn more at quona.com.

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Quona Capital

Quona Capital is a venture firm specializing in financial technology for inclusion in emerging markets. Learn more at quona.com.