How Ramani prevents fraud using Avenue

$300k

risky payments prevented

speed to built alerts

active monitors

About company

Ramani is a Fintech startup, building financial infrastructure for Africa's supply chains. Africa's micro-distributors gain quick and easy access to SME financing with Ramani.

“Our aim is to track all of our financial operations with Avenue ."

Catherine Njeri

Business Operations Manager

Challenge

With the launch of a lending product, Ramani needed to keep a close watch on customer activity

In 2021, Ramani launched a lending product, offering inventory financing to their micro-distributor customers, most of whom are in the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector. With these flexible loans, distributors scale by buying more inventory, then pay them back as the stock is sold. The new fintech capabilities allowed distributors to not only manage procurement, sales, and warehouse operations, but scale their business further by sourcing more inventory.

Today, Ramani provides financing to over 200 distributors across Tanzania. At this scale, Business Operations Manager Catherine Njeri knew Ramani’s operational monitoring processes needed to evolve along with the company.

With thousands of dollars being lent to customers, Ramani needed real-time visibility into risks that come with a lending product. The customer success team needed to track distributor credit limits, and make sure financing never exceeded them. They also had to know right away when distributors breached contracts, such as failing to make payments after selling stock.

Before Avenue, the customer success team had no ability to spot and resolve these issues autonomously. Catherine would have to manually pull data reports, and comb through them for issues like these. She’d then reach out to the distributor’s assigned success agent, who would check in with their customer.

These workflows were fine when Ramani had a smaller distributor network, but simply weren’t sustainable anymore. Instead, Catherine needed a way to flag problems automatically, alerting the CS team as issues arose. Then, she needed to be able to analyze the incidents in aggregate later, revealing trends and problem areas.

“Before Avenue, I had to raise the flag every time there was an issue. Avenue bridges that gap, removing the need for a middleman.”

Solution

Avenue’s alerting enables the customer success team to act on issues and gives management big-picture visibility

Catherine set up monitors with Avenue to automatically alert agents when credit limits are surpassed or loans aren’t repaid. Now, customer success agents don’t need Catherine’s involvement to resolve financing issues. They’re empowered to act independently, as problems arise.

Avenue also helps Catherine unlock key insights from Ramani’s data — like whether a specific distributor isn’t making payments, or customer orders aren’t being approved quickly enough. By revealing how often certain alerts are triggered, Catherine identifies opportunities to improve Ramani’s operations.

Finally, Avenue isn’t just solving problems; it’s expanding how Ramani’s teams work. The Airtable integration empowers non-technical teams to get exactly what they need from the platform. Sales and customer success teams decide for themselves what they’d like to be alerted on. Then, they create an Airtable ticket which goes directly to the Engineering team, who creates the Alert in just a few minutes.

“Avenue’s been very helpful in showing us how often certain alerts get triggered. That shows us where we can build a new business process to eliminate any bottlenecks.”

Results

With Avenue, Ramani has caught $300k worth of missed loan payments as they happen.

With Avenue, Ramani can monitor their financial operations in real time, even as they continue to scale. Teams spend their time taking action where it’s needed — not digging through data to look for issues.

7x faster time to build alerts
15 active monitors
$300k+ in risky payments flagged

Ramani is still in the early stages of their journey with Avenue. As their experience with the tool matures, the Ramani team looks forward to using it to help distributors optimize their own warehouse operations. For example, Avenue could alert when customers need to reorder stock, or flag salespeople that aren’t meeting quotas.

Catherine is also planning to dive into Avenue’s Playbooks capabilities, giving agents step-by-step instructions and automations on the actions that need to be taken after an alert fires.