Term Fi­nance Hold­ings has won the 2020 Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy award in the Cham­pi­ons of Busi­ness awards cer­e­mo­ny.

At the start of 2015, Oliv­er Sag­ba found­ed Term Fi­nance Hold­ings Lim­it­ed, a web-based cred­it and loans op­er­a­tion based in Port-of-Spain, with just two peo­ple—him­self and an­oth­er em­ploy­ee. Near­ly five years lat­er, Term Fi­nance has a staff count of 15.

Eleven are in Trinidad and four are coun­try man­agers based in Guyana, Ja­maica, St Lu­cia and Bar­ba­dos.

Nick Farah, who spe­cialised in mod­ern bank­ing tech­nolo­gies at RBC in both Cana­da and Trinidad, joined the team the fol­low­ing year as Re­gion­al Man­ag­er, in what was a sig­nif­i­cant cap­ture for Sab­ga’s start­up.

On No­vem­ber 15, Sab­ga and Farah won the cov­et­ed bmo­bile Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Award at the TT Cham­ber’s Cham­pi­ons of Busi­ness Awards.

Term Fi­nance’s growth and suc­cess are down to their hard work and in­ge­nu­ity, but they cred­it bmo­bile’s ar­chi­tec­ture and frame­work as con­tribut­ing huge­ly to both. The team man­ages TT$60m a year in loans, and it achieves on be­half of its clients a strike rate of 80%. Those are im­pres­sive num­bers, es­pe­cial­ly since they run a 100% vir­tu­al op­er­a­tion.

There is no shop front, no walk-in of­fice. It has nev­er had a face to face meet­ing with a sin­gle cus­tomer.

“In any giv­en month we’re dis­burs­ing over a thou­sand loans,” Sab­ga says. “If you ac­tu­al­ly trace what is re­quired op­er­a­tional­ly to han­dle a thou­sand cus­tomers face to face through a shop front every month, we wouldn’t be able to do that with 15 em­ploy­ees.”

Term Fi­nance was one of three fi­nal­ists for the award. The oth­ers were Caribbean Air­lines, which has com­plete­ly re­vamped its op­er­a­tions dig­i­tal­ly, and Vi­brant Tech­nol­o­gy So­lu­tions Lim­it­ed, spe­cial­ists in ICT project man­age­ment and ICT ser­vices.

No one at the com­pa­ny had a hand in pick­ing the win­ner, but bmo­bile was the tech­no­log­i­cal back­bone of all the op­er­a­tions.

Ian Galt, TSTT’s Gen­er­al Man­ag­er En­ter­prise Ser­vices, was full of praise for all the com­pa­nies for the ma­jor strides they took in in­te­grat­ing tech­nol­o­gy in­to their op­er­a­tions and ac­cept­ing the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty of be­ing the ar­chi­tects of the fu­ture. He com­mend­ed the gutsi­ness of Term Fi­nance.

“You could ar­gue that banks al­ready had an on­line pres­ence, but in Oliv­er’s case, he lit­er­al­ly cre­at­ed a busi­ness. Us­ing tech­nol­o­gy, he said, ‘I’m go­ing to go for it’”.

Re­search shows that with­in the next five years or so, every com­pa­ny will in some way be—at least in part—a soft­ware or tech com­pa­ny, as most busi­ness­es go through the process of digi­ti­sa­tion. This goes hand-in-hand with a re­cent re­port by the In­ter­na­tion­al Da­ta Cor­po­ra­tion which sug­gests that by 2022, 60% of glob­al GDP will come from dig­i­tal or­gan­i­sa­tions.

T&T is very well con­nect­ed and well-placed, Galt adds.

“We have a very high mo­bile pen­e­tra­tion, good broad­band con­nec­tion and a large fi­bre foot­print. Our bang for buck is ex­cel­lent as a coun­try”, Galt de­clared.

“You can have 30 min­utes with a cus­tomer face to face, but I can guar­an­tee that we know a whole lot more about that cus­tomer than you can get face to face” Sab­ga says.

“Tech­nol­o­gy has en­abled that.”