RAWALPINDI: Two women behind Pakistani fintech company Oraan, which recently made headlines for raising $3 million in the largest seed funding closed by a women-led Pakistani startup, say they hope their success will encourage and empower more women to strive for financial inclusion.
According to the World Economic Forum, women make up 55 percent of the world’s unbanked population, meaning they have no access to banking or insurance products. In Pakistan, only around 11 percent women have access to overall financial services, according to the World Bank.
Oraan, founded in 2018 by former investment banker Halima Iqbal and design strategist Farwah Tapal, aims to change that.
“Hopefully more and more women take this journey [of financial inclusion],” Iqbal told Arab News. “It’s not easy, but it’s possible.”
Oraan decided to start with digitizing ROSCAs (rotating credit and savings associations), or committees of people who contribute money to a pool that is distributed to a member each month. It will expand into more financial services, with plans to become a digital bank.
In Pakistan, 41 percent of the population saves through committees, with up to $5 billion rotating annually.
Oraan already has a community of more than 10,000 savers in over 170 cities, allowing its users to form committees and save with groups beyond their immediate geographical and social networks. Some 84 percent of Oraan users are women who use the committees to save, borrow, build emergency funds to pay for education, treatment and achieve other goals like travel and or establishing their own business.
“When women are financially empowered it has a trickle-down impact like nothing else does,” Iqbal said, saying she believed women who were in charge of their own money were able to educate future generations in how to have control over their financial lives.
“The economic advantages to half the population being included in the financial conversation are immense,” she said. “It empowers a community and even our country.”
Tapal explained that women, when they have the opportunity to do so, “invest back” into their children and the future of their family.
In the future, Oraan plans to expand into other products that will position the company to become Pakistan’s first women-first digital, social bank.
“We want to continue to invest in and be very cognizant of how big the issue is when it comes to financial exclusion,” Iqbal said, “and be able to provide that access to finance in a more human and customer centric way.”
