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Our customers are in emerging markets across Africa and Asia. Most of them are micro and small to medium enterprises who need instant access to finance so they can grow and invest. So far we’ve served more than 10 million customers and disbursed over 40 million loans – and the numbers are rising daily.

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The basic model of the Kiva intermediary model, illustrated in Figure 1, is that small lenders lend to Kiva. Kiva lends to MFIs. These MFIs then lend to poor people. Thus the MFIs are using Kiva as a financing agency. Kiva is actually providing a service to small lenders who want to participate directly in the microfinance movement. In the Kiva model, there is no interest given by Kiva to the lender and no interest charged by Kiva to the MFI. However, the MFI charges normal interest rates to the poor borrower. Kiva is a not-forprofit.

One such disruption is the rising industry of crowdfunding, which involves a platform, an individual or entity in need of funding, and a community of people willing to collectively contribute these funds in exchange for rewards and recognition. The amount of money raised by crowdfunding platforms during 2012 is expected to reach $2.8 billion, up 91% since 2011.

Operating in Uganda, Zambia, Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania, and Pakistan, the fintech plans to expand its offering and service to Côte d’Ivoire and Nigeria. 

We’re optimistic about the possibilities in these markets and continue to see huge growth opportunities in Africa, with the potential to replicate our successes in other markets over the longer term.”

Thndr recently acquired the necessary licensing from the Financial Regulatory Authority (FRA) making the fast-growing startup the first company to acquire a brokerage license in Egypt since 2008. 

“ Our vision is to put wealth in the hands of everyday individuals. With the rise of technology, and the foresight of a very supportive Financial Regulatory Authority, we can make this vision come to life — Egypt is expected to be the 7th largest economy by 2030 and has more than 100 mn people, most of which are young and are looking for a convenient and digital way to invest their money. That’s why we are excited to bring a new breed of young investors to the market.” 

Microfinance practices were originally developed in offline contexts. Modern microfinance practices were based on development models for the financial and social empowerment of the poorest of poor in developing countries. Several of these practices drew from existing traditions of money lending within local communities that were reformed to be in sync with rural development and the empowerment of the underprivileged individual. In present ‘postmodern’ times, microfinance providers are using online tools in the hopes of broadening the reach and extending the advantages provided by such a model of micro-lending and micro-borrowing. In this article, we examine an online peer-to-peer lending and borrowing website, Kiva.org, which uses online social networking tools in microfinance. The study is thus a close look at the actual content of the website with a view to understanding the representational practices of online space through Internet mediated microfinance.

What Andy Jury is referring to is the backstory behind Mukuru.  “Our founders were in this same boat,” he adds, “and what started out as a desire to iron out personal wrinkles, in getting money home to their friends and family, morphed into a realisation that there was a massive business opportunity if we could build a simple, secure, rapid means of affordably being able to send money.”  A remittances-led financial services company that was brought to life to empower financially under-serviced migrants, Mukuru has become renowned as the go-to platform to send money in a convenient, safe and affordable manner across Africa.  “We wanted to produce a transformative solution that was simple to use and accessible to anyone with a mobile device,” Jury, the company’s Group CEO, adds. “It required us to walk in our customers’ shoes, understand the pain points they had with remitting money home and build a solution that addressed these challenges.”  And this is exactly what the company has spent the past decade doing.

“We’ve attempted to stay true to this approach as our business has grown, expanded and evolved – if we continue to obsess about trying to understand what customers really need and build solutions to address these requirements, then we’ll be well placed to walk alongside our customer base as their needs evolve.”  Following this philosophy, Mukuru has developed a remittance portfolio that is characterised by a high degree of customer loyalty, trust and repeat business – features that have enabled the company to reach a total 25 million transactions, a figure recorded in late 2018.   

What Andy Jury is referring to is the backstory behind Mukuru.  “Our founders were in this same boat,” he adds, “and what started out as a desire to iron out personal wrinkles, in getting money home to their friends and family, morphed into a realisation that there was a massive business opportunity if we could build a simple, secure, rapid means of affordably being able to send money.”  A remittances-led financial services company that was brought to life to empower financially under-serviced migrants, Mukuru has become renowned as the go-to platform to send money in a convenient, safe and affordable manner across Africa.  “We wanted to produce a transformative solution that was simple to use and accessible to anyone with a mobile device,” Jury, the company’s Group CEO, adds. “It required us to walk in our customers’ shoes, understand the pain points they had with remitting money home and build a solution that addressed these challenges.”  And this is exactly what the company has spent the past decade doing.

Engagement Drivers in a Lending Marketplace: The Case for Kiva

Kenyan startup, Abacus, in partnership with Strathmore University, is organising the Abacus Investment Academy to train individuals who want to learn more about financial markets. The program will take place at the Strathmore Business School in Nairobi and participants will be guided on how to invest in the different sectors and what to look out for before investing.

he adopted approach is applied and evaluated employing a selection of cases from individual loans. From this perspective, the case base and the codified knowledge about how to evaluate risks associated with a loan represent two examples of knowledge IT artifacts.

Abacus is a web and mobile software that lets you keep tabs on whatever is going on with the Nairobi Securities exchange in real time. And now, the team behind it has launched an Android app. The app was launched today and users now have access to regular updates from activities on the Nairobi Securities Exchange. The Abacus team, led by Joel Macharia as the CEO and Kevin Omwega as the director, have more than ten years of market experience. Abacus was one of the startups that participated in 2015 DEMO Africa event.

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Kiva lenders receive on average about 96% of their money back and agree not to receive interest. “It is done philanthropically,” Shah says. For many, presumably, it is their first impact investment.

Kiva lenders receive on average about 96% of their money back and agree not to receive interest. “It is done philanthropically,” Shah says. For many, presumably, it is their first impact investment.

Focus on your customers’ pain pointsSenior Solution clearly identified many of its customers’ pain points and tweaked its offering to help customers overcome them. Among the difficulties customers faced were a fragmented and large number of suppliers. This lack of integration created compliance problems and compatibility issues due to the company having multiple platforms. Also, no end to end solution existed. Different systems existed for bonds, equities, foreign exchange, front and back office, and more. In addition there were specificities from the Brazilian context that complicated dealings with banks such as a high level of inflation: traditional systems cannot handle so many digits, for example. And, previously there were complex methods for computing interest rates on interbank loans. All of these issues added up to be a hassle for customers who had to deal with them manually before Senior Solution introduced a way to ease the process.

The remittances services were declared an essential service during the lockdown restrictions to curb the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic.South Africa moved to level 3 lockdown late in December after the country breached the one million mark of confirmed Covid-19 cases while Zimbabwe went into a hard lockdown as the entire country was declared a coronavirus hotspot as the infection rates drastically surged in all the country’s regions.“We remain cautiously optimistic we can continue in the year ahead to layer new products and services onto our platform to unlock value and move our customers up along the financial inclusion curve.“We will also constantly look to build our network and footprint across Africa and beyond, which will allow us to grow our business not only in terms of the breadth of relevant products and services we offer, but in the depth of customer markets we serve,” said Jury.

The future is really exciting for us and links into why we participate in these fintech festivals. We think what we’ve proven in South Africa is scalable to other markets, especially those with similar setup to South Africa five years ago. Our focus is largely on emerging markets and seeking to partner our capability into a market opportunity, where the partner brings local knowledge and regulatory understanding and we bring platform capability. There needs to be a level of maturity and fintech support that enables our business model. There must be a very strong payments layer and smartphone penetration rates must be good. If those are in place and there’s a low propensity for retail stock investors to be investing in the local stock market, we start to be interested.

"We believe that this investment revival should be led by investments in securities on the JSE." said Almero Oosthuizen, VP of Business Development at EasyEquities, eloborating on what led to the founding of the FinTech startup.