Kaoun, a Tunisian fintech startup, has updated its payments app Flouci with new features as a result of its participation in the Central Bank of Tunisia’s regulatory sandbox.
Kaoun is “building a pipeline for financial inclusion,” as co-founders Nebras Jemel, Anis Kallel, and Rostom Bouazizi put their studies in the United States – at Harvard University, University of Rochester, and Columbia University, respectively – on hold to come back to Tunisia and build a fintech startup.
Flouci, the company’s first product, is a tool that helps users in opening bank accounts. The app was launched a year ago, and Kaoun has since launched the public experimentation phase of an innovative customer onboarding process that is entirely digital and accessible via smartphone. The regulatory sandbox of Tunisia’s Central Bank has cleared this approach for experimentation.
The sandbox is a new initiative by Tunisia’s Central Bank, which aims to collaborate closely with innovative startups while also developing the regulatory framework using real data. Kaoun is part of the first cohort and has worked on an e-KYC (Know Your Customer) process to open free bank accounts for the unbanked and underbanked without requiring physical presence.
This is replacing its current video interviews with banking agents with an automated liveness challenge and other algorithmic checks using a proprietary process. The goal is to allow most clients open fully compliant bank accounts and mobile money wallets in a matter of minutes, reducing processing times.
“The national decashing strategy first starts with providing better payment tools, suited for the needs of the target populations currently excluded from these services and forced to work in the informal sector and to only use cash,” said Anis Kallel.
“We realised that facilitating access to financial services with a 100 per cent free banking offer opened remotely and in under an hour can help contribute to that, on top of the transfer and payment functionalities integrated with Flouci. We would like, through this collaboration with the Central Bank of Tunisia, to allow every financial institution to use this technology, and reduce the cost and time of access to essential financial services. The technology allows it, and the regulations will make it possible at scale.”