Kaoun, a Tunisian fintech startup, has updated its Flouci payments app with new features

Kaoun, a Tunisian fintech startup, has added new features to its payments app Flouci as a result of its participation in the Central Bank of Tunisia’s regulatory sandbox.

Kaoun was founded in January 2018 by co-founders Nebras Jemel, Anis Kallel, and Rostom Bouazizi, who put their studies in the United States – at Harvard University, University of Rochester, and Columbia University, respectively – on hold to return to Tunisia and build a fintech startup.

Its first product is Flouci, an app that assists users in opening bank accounts. The app was released a year ago, and Kaoun has since begun the public experimentation phase of an innovative customer onboarding process that is entirely digital and accessible via smartphone. The Central Bank of Tunisia’s regulatory sandbox has approved this process for experimentation.

The sandbox is a new initiative launched by the Central Bank of Tunisia with the goal of collaborating closely with innovative startups and evolving the regulatory framework based on real-world data. Kaoun is a member 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 reduce processing times for the majority of clients and enable them to open fully compliant bank accounts and mobile money wallets in a matter of minutes.

“The national decashing strategy begins with providing better payment tools that are tailored to the needs of the target populations who are currently excluded from these services and forced to work in the informal sector and only use cash,” Anis Kallel explained.

“We realized that, in addition to the transfer and payment functionalities integrated with Flouci, facilitating access to financial services with a 100% free banking offer opened remotely and in under an hour can help contribute to that.” Through this collaboration with the Central Bank of Tunisia, we hope to enable every financial institution to use this technology, reducing the cost and time required to access essential financial services. The technology allows it, and the regulations will allow it to be done on a large scale.”