Spotter is a Moroccan startup aiming to help companies verify cheques and assess customers’ creditworthiness.
Spotter, a Moroccan startup that aims to support businesses reduce the number of returned cheques and gauge the creditworthiness of customers, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from UM6P Ventures.
Spotter: Supporting access to credit
Spotter was founded by Abdele Boukachabine and Mamoune Kettani and is developing an API-driven platform that aids companies and institutions in analyzing and better understand consumers’ financial data. Their technologies aim to assist individuals and businesses in gaining access to credit while supporting lenders and other finance firms.
Africa is home to large numbers of unbanked individuals and much of the continent is therefore cash-based as a result. As a result, cash payments are common, as is the use of cheques by banked individuals and companies. Returned cheques are a serious burden for African companies and present a significant challenge, as do difficulties in assessing the financial situation of potential customers.
Detecting problematic cheques
Spotter uses technologies including optical character recognition (OCR) to offer an instant cheque verification system in order to combat the problem of returned cheques. This allows companies to instantly assess the creditworthiness of customers paying by cheque and to discover which customers cheques will be returned. The service will be available through Spotter’s web and mobile applications, allowing businesses to deploy the solution across a range of locations.
The rise of open banking
The company is developing its systems through secured APIs, which is in line with its aim to pay a full role in the ever-expanding open banking environment. The system allows banks and fintechs to support one another through the offering of various services and to gain access to services and functionality that they might otherwise lack.
Open banking as an approach has been growing in popularity and many institutions are partnering with startups to develop APIs to provide digital financing solutions. However, Morocco still lacks a unified approach to APIs. Spotter will make its product available to local banks that are seeking to gain banking information on Spotter’s potential customers.
A recent report by McKinsey and Co. predicted an eightfold increase in revenues for fintech firms in 2025 as Internet access increases.