Mentored Study Program Interim Report

Mentored Study Program Interim Report

Lisa Zhu

Candidate for MBA, Class of 2015

Participating company: Pengo Loans, Inc. (Raleigh, NC)

Date of participating: Spring 1 & 2, 2015

Index

1. Nature of the mentored study
2. The parties involved in oversight of the program within the company
3. Projects and responsibilities which have been assigned
4. Schedule and objectives
5. Projects which have been completed and problems which have been encountered

• Nature of the mentored study:

Mentored by senior management at a micro-finance company to conduct. In the context of this study, mentoring is considered as a formal effort that has been codified by the academic unit and is part of unit procedures or practice.

Mentoring is a core component in the training of young professionals, especially very helpful to international young professionals.  Mentored study emphasized coaching, professional and personal guidance, sponsorship, role modeling, and socialization into a profession.

• The parties involved in oversight of the program within the company

Senior executives are active mentors within Pengo, including CEO and Senior Consultant.

Collaborated with outside seasoned advisor who worked for Pengo for a long-time and knows the business very well.

Also worked closely with finance managers from loan borrowing companies and discussed their financial performance and operational performance regularly.  

• Projects and responsibilities which have been assigned

Project 1: Develop the model of venture debt Machini Loan, which is a new type of debt very popular in Africa. The objective was to understand the purpose of the Machini debt, set the lending criteria and develop the financial model to screen Machini Loan applicants. Once target loan borrowers have been decided, conduct the second round due diligence to further confirm their financial situation – due diligence procedures are including management meetings, online information exchanging, and analyzing relevant financial reports and other official bank documents. After making the loan to the borrowers, then monitor borrowers monthly financial performance, if borrowers had continuous difficult financial situations that broke the loan requirements, then discuss how to terminate the contract and redeem the losses.

Project 2: Understand the model of venture debt Opportunity Loan. Opportunity Loan is a more complicated type of loan compared to Machini, because it included more factors with no certain possibility to occur in the future. According to the historical data, give each considerable factors weight to develop an evaluation model to analyze applicant companies’ financial performance, so as to make a decision of whether to make a loan contract or not. There were only 5% of all Opportunity Loan applicants past the evaluation in the past year, so the screening work was harder than expectation. And the time and effort associated with loan screening were significant. The reason of introducing Opportunity Loan into Africa is that qualified borrowers have high potential in making profits in the future and lowest possibility of loan default compared to other type of loan borrowers.