You guarantee or insure loans that somebody else appraised, and you rarely see how those appraisals were done.
For guarantors and insurers of agricultural loans, where one season can bring failed rains, a falling crop price and a buyer who walks away.
Where an audit of a lender stops short
You can audit a partner lender's credit policy, its board minutes and its audited accounts. None of those shows how the officer worked the file on the day: which questions were asked, which were skipped, which evidence was accepted unreconciled.
Today we analyse the risk in the files you guarantee or insure
If you guarantee individual loans, we analyse each file: what the loan is based on and where the evidence is thin. Where your guarantee covers a lender's whole agricultural loan book, we review those loans against the criteria you agreed with the lender. An insurer can use the same risk analysis on an agricultural file today, though nothing built for insurers is live yet. Whether to guarantee or insure stays your decision.
Checking eligibility first
We check each file against your fund's eligibility rules before we appraise it. That helps when your mandate sets out the results you want, and the files that arrive do not fit any checklist.
Preparing a file for climate finance
If a lender's agricultural file has a case for climate adaptation, we help prepare the evidence that an accredited entity or a climate programme needs to take it to a climate fund. We are not an accredited entity, and we hold no fund's money.
Your partner lender can hand you its working
A lender that works this way keeps the working of every file it appraised and can hand it to you. You do not need access to its systems.
We are also building a way to see the whole loan
Guarantee schemes, crop and livestock insurance, value chain and group lending, warehouse receipts and savings groups were each built separately, and each sees only its own part of a farmer's loan. What we are building would let a guarantor and the crop's insurer see everyone the loan depends on: the growers, the group, the input supplier, the buyer and the lender, and what was checked about each of them. It is not live yet.