Founders Thursday
Please join us from 2-3pm Thursday 13th July 2023 for our Founders Thursday webinar series with guest speaker Shabnam Wazed. Shabnam is Founder and CEO of AGAM International and has been through the UK Start-up and Innovator visa schemes. She will share her knowledge and experiences of founding her company in the UK.
About Shabnam:
Shabnam Wazed is an award-winning entrepreneur with a mission to revolutionise lending using AI driven technology and behavioural insights. She is the Founder and CEO of AGAM International, a UK based Fintech that provides an intelligent and never-seen-before alternative credit scoring system for lenders to assess credit worthiness of its customers rapidly and accurately.
Shabnam won the Women in Tech Excellence Award 2022 and has also been a finalist in the Women in Finance Awards 2022. Shabnam is a visionary shaping the industry through an AI led solution to solve the problem of financial inclusion in her home nation of Bangladesh and beyond. Shabnam is an inspiration to women in the Fintech sector and to the women of her community.
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Shabnam started AGAM in November 2019. Already it has received multiple endorsements as a highly innovative and scalable start-up by Launch Space – Bristol, Innovate in Britain and Fintech Wales. The company also joined the prestigious Global Entrepreneur Programme (GEP), led by the UK Department of International Trade in August 2021, making it the first ever Bangladesh-founded business to do so. In October 2022, AGAM closed an oversubscribed funding round led by the Development Bank of Wales.
Approved by the Bangladesh Bank, the central bank of Bangladesh, AGAMu2019s successful pilot, u2018PrimeAgrimu2019, launched with one of Bangladeshu2019s leading banks, Prime Bank, won the Best Innovation u2013 Finance Category, at the Bangladesh Innovation Awards in March 2022. It also won the Bronze title at the prestigious EFMA-Accenture Awards on Banking Innovation in 2021, being the first ever South Asian operated entity to secure that title. PrimeAgrim also won the Asian Banking Innovation Awards 2022 under the AI in Banking category.u00a0
This pilot was partially sponsored by Swiss NGO, Swisscontact, and US based MetLife Foundation. The commercial roll out of the PrimeAgrim was announced in December 2022.
Key achievements:
Through their partnerships, AGAM have:
- Pioneered the first and only digital and Sharia micro finance platform in Bangladesh
- Enabled Early Salary Access for employees of one of Bangladeshu2019s leading commercial banks, Prime Bank
- Unlocked financial access for thousands of Ready Made Garment factory workers in Bangladesh
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