Mobile money concept. FILE PHOTO | NMG
The requirement to maintain social distance during Covid-19 pandemic has presented a big blow to small investment groups that largely rely on physical meetings to contribute and borrow.
Several groups have been forced to cease contributions and others have had to rely on mobile money transfers that offer little transparency to the rest of the group members on the financial growth of the chamas as they are popularly known.
However, a new innovation looks to address these challenges. The Malipo Circles lets people, friends, families and investment clubs easily collect, lend, borrow, and fundraise money without the need to meet, while offering high level of transparency.
Erick Oyugi who came up with the application says he was driven by challenges he had experienced in his own investment group where the accounting for collections from members was becoming complex and less transparent even after the group opened a joint account.
“Having a joint account even added to the logistical challenges since it was not as transparent as we would have wanted. We had to meet to review bank statements which one person could not obtain since all of us were signatories to the account,” says Mr Oyugi, a computer science graduate from the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (Jkuat).
“Ironically, all we wanted to see is what everyone has contributed as well as knowing how much we had in the bank – it was very simple questions that we needed answered. It was a lot of hard work to do this the way we were doing it and all of us were really busy.”
The investment group challenges gave birth to the app that enables the collections to be done more effectively and efficiently, do the accounting, the summations, and the money could be transferred to the bank- all in the full view of members.
The app which has since attracted just over 15,000 users since it was late last year also has a provision for facilitating the lending between friends. A member makes a request to the rest of the group members on Malipo Circles where those willing to lend simply make the approvals on the application, saving the needy member the hustle to call each one of them.
The technology enthusiast says it took four years to fully develop the application which had to be tried for two years and which has received lots of uptake after group meetings got disrupted by the measures put in place to contain the spread of the coronavirus.
“It took us quite some time to test the application and integrate it with banks as well as add security features like limiting access levels for members including those who could disburse. Other unique features had to be developed like automating lending in the ‘merry go round’ where everyone contributes every month but only one or more of them can take a loan at that time,” Mr Oyugi says.
The app also saves time for physical meetings when they happen according to the entrepreneur since all members in the group come sufficiently informed of the financial records of the group. This essentially gave them more time to discuss other issues during the meetings including investment ideas and new business ventures.
Beyond chamas, the app developer hopes that it will become a useful tool for extended family members and friends who may not be in any formal investment groups to lend among themselves and other social networks.
Some lending agencies have also taken advantages of the platform to offer loans for small business, while landlords use it to allow tenants to pay for monthly rents in small bits during the month, adding to the long list of possibilities the app has created.
“We recently found out a case where someone has part-time employees and he uses Malipo Circles to disburse cash to them on a daily basis. This is not using Malipo Circles for loans but as a means of disbursing payments,”Mr Oyugi notes.
The developers are now hoping to get the application on the main mobile stores including Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android to make it easily accessible even as a relaunch is being planned to tailor the app in targeting new markets like South Africa, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Uganda, and parts of West Africa.
Growing the app subscribers tenfold in the next half a decade sounds like a tall target but the developers are optimistic that the market is ripe with the extensive growth of mobile money already paving the way for such a possibility.
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