Qasir Opens Access to P2P Lending Funding for Micro-Entrepreneurs

The startup provider of the Point of Sales (POS) platform from Indonesia, Qasir is exploring collaboration with KoinWorks and a number of other fintech companies to provide alternative venture capital financing to entrepreneurs in the Qasir ecosystem.

This effort was made because there are still many micro-entrepreneurs who have not received information about funding options from P2P Lending, including the submission mechanism and others.

The provision of capital assistance uses the PO financing mechanism or invoice financing. With this system, merchants can register their business, projects that are being worked on, by including proof of PO/invoice to be paid.

According to the CEO of Office Qasir, Ivan Hadwin Rarumangkay, this step was made as simple as possible because he understands that the difficulties of micro-entrepreneurs are not only administrative but also digital literacy challenges.

“We don’t want to complicate micro-merchants with complex processes. Through submissions via Qasir, our team will manage merchant data and process it in an integrated manner. As a result, merchant transaction data will be a reference for KoinWorks to set the maximum funding limit for funds,” Ivan explained.

Machine Learning Cuts Administrative Stages

As the project proponent, Ivan also said that filing through Qasir would at least cut the administrative stages quite significantly, compared to submitting separately.

Especially if entrepreneurs are not familiar with the concept of Peer to Peer (P2P) Lending, choosing a platform is time-consuming, not to mention understanding how it works.

“From here we realized that there needs to be a middleman so that every entrepreneur has the same opportunity to get business capital,” he added.

At least, through a sampling analysis from the company, the merchant’s monthly transaction recap will be processed automatically and numerically, which will prove the financial capability of the entrepreneur.

If illustrated, a process that usually takes 10 stages, can now be reduced to only 5 stages. For information, Qasir uses machine learning to recap merchant transaction data as collaterals for submitting funds.

With this technology, Qasir can cut up to five stages of submitting P2P Lending funds, compared to submitting manually. The process will be even simpler if merchants take advantage of the QRIS digital payment facility–which is in the Qasir application–for every transaction.

By using digital transactions, the transactions are automatically validated as real transactions. That way, the merchant’s opportunity to get financing is even greater.

For now, the submission of funding for peer-to-peer (P2P) lending through Qasir is still in the form of a pilot project. Ivan said the initial stage of socialization was opened to 350 merchants.

“We first select merchants who have the good financial capacity, then we will open for 8,000 merchants with an initial concentration on the island of Java,” he said.

Layered Security for Data Safety

Answering the question of security, CEO of Qasir Michael Williem added that this project has gone through a layered security evaluation stage to ensure merchant data is always safe.

“It is undeniable that one of the concerns of merchants who are still hesitant to try digital financing is the security of transaction data, capital flows to borrowers and lenders. For that, internally, we use a special VPN that is closed platform in nature,” he said.

As for ensuring that the funds obtained are used properly, PO and invoice payments will be made directly to the issuer, not to the merchant who submitted it.

“So it’s not that we give cash, but their PO or invoice which will be paid later and the entrepreneur will pay in lump sum or installments,” said the man who is familiarly called Mike.

Currently, Qasir merchants continue to increase. As of July 2021, there were 740,000 users downloaded the Qasir application, of which 233,000 were active users with a total of 177 million transactions. Of this amount, Qasir recorded a total transaction value of IDR 14.2 trillion.