Where there is no credit bureau, you sell your way to one.
We sold. We observed. We earned the trust. Now we want to underwrite.
Simma spent four and a half years formulating that sequence, turning cross border e-commerce into a creditworthiness layer for a country that has none. Cheap acquisition, item level behaviour, and a repayment record on every single delivery. Tested and validated in Iraq. Now it is time to apply the blueprint elsewhere.
Four things have to exist before anyone can lend in such markets. We built all four.
The order is fixed. Nothing about it is specific to Iraq, which is what makes it a blueprint rather than a strategy.
A real, recurring use case
People transacting regularly, with real money, inside a digital medium. Not pilots and not intent surveys.
Value $18.5M
Monthly repeat 73%
Behavioural data deep enough to underwrite
Item level, continuous, and paired with a repayment record because goods ship before money is collected.
Transacting users 70,000
Observed failures ~90,000
The step that decides whether any of it works
Trust, not capital or licensing, is why financial institutions have struggled to convert this market. Getting a cash economy consumer to fund a wallet before they receive anything is the only reliable proof they will accept a financial product later.
Of transaction value 17%
Preloaded voluntarily
Dependable collateral, the one commerce cannot produce alone
Behaviour tells you who someone is. It does not verify what they earn or give you a hold on it. That needs verified income and control over disbursement, which is Project Yllo.
Yllo hardware ready
Licence and capital partner
Just a transaction? Household composition, income, discipline, reachability, and a great deal more.
Separate children's size bands alongside adult sizes give headcount, ages, and how the family grows.
Order value against cadence, brand tier and wallet preloads place a household in a bracket without a payslip.
Voluntary preloading, combining orders to avoid fees, redeeming points. Literacy and organisation, observed.
A verified delivery address maps to a neighbourhood, and a neighbourhood carries property prices. A wealth read independent of the basket.
Category mix, seasonal spikes around Eid, baskets built and abandoned over months.
Cash on delivery makes every order a settled micro loan. Who pays, who stalls, who refuses at the door.
Whether they answer, how fast, and whether they are there to accept the order. Contactability is a real collections variable.
A customer asking us to hold delivery until the salary lands has just disclosed their pay cycle and their cash position.
A scorecard cannot be trained on people who always pay. It needs observed failures, and a collateral model never generates them. Roughly 90,000 orders were cancelled, refused at the door, or abandoned after placement, each attached to a phone number, a governorate, a device and a basket.
A real Simma customer, anonymised. Everything in the left column was observed, never asked. Nothing was declared, supplied, or verified against a document. The right column is the picture assembled from it, ending in a limit and a risk grade. There are roughly 70,000 of these.
Iraq's private sector is completely off the grid.
It is also most of the country. Salaries arrive as cash in an envelope, once a month, leaving no account, no record and no verifiable income for the majority of Iraqi workers.
Behavioural data can tell a lender who someone is and how they behave, but it cannot verify what they earn or give anyone a hold on it. Closing that gap needs data and control over disbursement. Yllo is the first infrastructure in Iraq built to deliver both.
How it works
Installed at the employer. Payroll goes in as cash, the employee is verified biometrically and through the app, and the payment is released automatically. Income becomes verified and salary becomes a dependable point of control.
The hardware
Four IQD denomination cassettes, ATM grade validator and dispenser, biometric identification with app authentication. No PIN pads, no cards, no counter.
Unlocking new markets. A blueprint for consumer finance.
Syria is the clearest place to run it again, and the time is now.
Simma goes in on commerce
Cross border e-commerce under the Simma brand, cash on delivery, no licence required and no balance sheet exposed. Build the user base, earn the trust, and start writing the credit file from the first delivery.
The financial offering launches on top
Once the base exists and the data is deep enough, a full financial proposition goes live into customers who are already yours. Carried under the partner brand, or launched as a rebrand, whichever protects the mother brand better.
- Sanctions repealed, December 2025
- SWIFT access restored to Syrian banks
- Visa and Mastercard authorised by the Central Bank, May 2026
- noon opened in Damascus
- Zain paid $747M for a mobile licence
- Nobody holds the consumer layer
Syria is not the only option. Libya is the closest parallel and screens well on the same criteria, as do Algeria and Lebanon. All cash dominant, all without a functioning consumer bureau, and all within reach of the same operating team.
The blueprint works. The right partner multiplies it.
Two columns. What is already built and running, and what a partner needs to bring to it.
- A four and a half year item level behavioural dataset, with a repayment record on every delivery
- A negative file of roughly 90,000 observed non completions
- Cross border supply across 50+ global brands
- A wallet consumers voluntarily preload, carrying 17% of transaction value, earned not forced
- A scoring engine built and ready to deploy
- Project Yllo, with a pilot agreed
- Nationwide delivery and cash collection at the door
- Capital. Turns a scored decision into a written loan, at volume. The engine exists and has never had a book behind it
- A licence. Lifts the ceiling on what can be offered and to whom, and brings every product under one roof
- Distribution and standing. Replaces one consumer at a time with a network, and opens doors acquisition spend cannot buy
- Simplified cross border money movement. Every order Simma sells has to be paid for abroad. Faster settlement and a better rate on the dollar reduce the working capital tied up in goods and feed straight through to margin, and to the price the consumer sees
The interesting part is not 300,000 orders. It is what four and a half years of dissecting them taught us, and what that can become with real financing behind it.
Now is the time to act. Let's talk.
Regulation in Iraq is moving faster than it has in a generation, the Central Bank is issuing and executing rather than consulting, and the rails are being rebuilt around a market that has never had them. Windows like this do not stay open long.