The Interledger Community 🌱: Richard Seshie

Cool Lion Fi — ILF Grant Final Report

Richard Seshie — Wed, 06 Sep 2023 18:59:55 +0000

##Brief Project Description

We love trade finance, climate finance and overall to make the life of small business entrepreneurs in developing markets such as West African countries much easier.

Access our previous progress report

##Progress on objectives
The grant support regarded conducting a research and exploration phase:
-Conduct market research (desk reading, interviews)
-Engage a top consulting firm to deliver an assessment of the financial regulatory policies and rules landscape
-Conduct user testing (interviews, card sorting, interactive mockups)
-Submit a comprehensive report about the requirements to be licensed inclusive of the technical architecture, operational plan, production roadmap and budget.

##Project Update

A number of issues from a key project promoter considerably slowed down our ability to deliver on the initial schedule. Now, this lies behind us.

Alltogether, we're happy to have fully completed our research phase and have submited a business and technology plan for which we offer some details below.

Beyond wanting to become the first crypto-friendly financial institution for 120+ million africans, our team was keen to build a crypto project supporting SMBs to access cross-border crypto loans to fund their path to decarbonization by acquiring low-carbon productive assets. The current market situation in the crypto space was not so conducive:
-A lot of crypto service enablers winding down or facing stiffer regulation and unwilling to open up their integrations to "exotic" countries
-Dearth of DeFi lenders
-Legal uncertainties: requesting funds from the public for an invesment purpose presented some serious legal consideration that we felt we didn't want to shoulder ultimately.

After carefully analyzing service gaps for SMBs in West Africa, we've identified trade finance, especially facilitating importer-eporter payment flows to be a huge market opportunity that can be disrupted.
Our focus in on securing a microfinance license (plus other licenses) and structuring the business in a way we offer COOL LION FI as a partnering crypto solution with high potential.

## Progress on Objectives, Key Activities

[DONE] Conduct market research (desk reading, interviews)
We conducted 14 interviews with respected figures or senior leadership of financial institutions operating in WAEMU as well as discussions with close to 30 other stakeholders.

[DONE] Engage a top consulting firm to deliver a comprehensive
assessment of the financial regulatory policies and rules landscape.
3, not 1 consulting firms supported our assessment and analysis of the regulatory landscape.

[DONE] Conduct user testing (interviews, card sorting, interactive mockups)
With support from XRPL Grants, we actually went beyond this, hired developers and shipped a MVP for Cool Lion Finance available at https://app.coollionfi.com/.
We've now pivoted to a nw service giving it less priortiy on our future roadmap. We are prioritizing being a crypto-friendly, regulated financial institution.

[DONE] Submit a comprehensive report about the requirements to be licensed inclusive of the technical architecture, operational plan, production roadmap and budget.
Submitted.

## What’s Next?

Our busines and technolgoy plan has been submitted to ILF for further consideration.

## Community Support

Thank you for ILF team for being understanding, exercicing patience and for such a wonderful support.

Cool Lion Finance — Grant Report #1

Richard Seshie — Thu, 02 Feb 2023 01:59:43 +0000

Hello Everybody ! Richard from Cool Lion Finance.
Cool Lion Finance has this big ambition to be the first crypto-friendly financial institution in Francophone Africa (200 million inhabitants) by obtaining a full-license stack (money transmitter/electronic money/microfinance license).
In addition to this, we're also big believers in climate finance and aim to also launch a platform connecting SMEs in emerging markets requesting green equipment loans to crypto lenders (aka the Kiva for green business loans).

Progress on objectives

The grant support regarded conducting a reaserch and exploration phase:
-Conduct market research (desk reading, interviews)
-Engage a top consulting firm to deliver a comprehensive
assessment of the financial regulatory policies and rules landscape
-Conduct user testing (interviews, card sorting, interactive mockups)
-Submit a comprehensive report about the requirements to be licensed inclusive of the technical architecture, operational plan, production roadmap and budget.

We are well on our way to complete the research phase and went above and beyond and started building.

Key activities

We collected primary data through desk research and secondary data by holding 11 interviews/meetings with different stakeholders (asset finance companies, executives from the financial services industry). Very important to note that we met the senior leadership and spoke with all the 9 asset financing companies in the country.
We hired a top consultant that provided a comprehensive
assessment of the financial regulatory policies and rules landscape. A report is being consolidated.
Cool Lion Finance was selected as one of the winners of XRPL Grants Wave 4 that gave us funding to start developing the tech for coollionfi.com, our green equipment loan p2p lending platform.
This led to hiring 2 developers, adopting our technical architecture and we built a landing page (https://coollionfi.com/) with a current wailist of 226 signups and growing. We are also working on the platform app.
We are building a pipeline of businesses in Africa interested in accessing our green equipment loan facility. So far we've identified 425 businesses from a dozen countries.

-We attended the ILP Summit in New Orleans where we gained a deeper understanding of ILP and made new connections and friends.

THE GREAT
-In speaking with the senior leadership of the banks and FIs undertaking equipment financing, it became clear of the need to have a broker that can source green equipment financing deals. We're helping them to do this since it aligns perfectly with our mission to drive green finance to businesses

THE GOOD
-We've built a web 2.5 platform for COOL LION FINANCE. We'd like to go fully web 3.0 but the cost of hiring blockchain developers and other requirements (security audits, etc...) are quite really high

THE UGLY
-We lost nearly half of the 100k $ XRPL grant locked in the FTX implosion saga. So we had to slow down the development of the platform app.

Communications and marketing

We have a landing page. We have a twitter https://twitter.com/CoolLionFI

What’s next?

-Finalize the report from our exploration phase
-Engage the central bank regulator by sending them a letter
-Build a $20 million pipeline of green business loan requests from SMEs
-Support local equipment financing institutions with sourcing green loan deals.

What community support would benefit your project?

-Sign up for our waiting list here and kindly bring along your acquaintances: https://coollionfi.com/

Richard Seshie — Travel Grant Report

Richard Seshie — Wed, 23 Nov 2022 01:40:31 +0000

Howdy! I am Richard Seshie, founder of COOL LION FINANCE, a startup building "loan-as-a-service" financing pulled from crypto + fiat lenders to help businesses in emerging markets decarbonize.

This was my first time attending an Interledger event !
So I had quite a long flight and made it New Orleans on November 10th. The energy was amazing afterwards.

From having the chance to showcase what my company is building at the welcome reception to engaging with peers who believe their work can make a positive dent on the world to interacting with highly knowledgeable persons with subject matter expertise and finally to a memorable evening akin to a mini carnival experience, these days have been fully enriching and rewarding.

Looking forward to such more opportunities !