Nigeria’s Fintech startup “Moyalo” wants to be the Uber of savings

Moyalo is a new web app that enables users to join a group of five or nine people to meet short-term savings goals— like putting away money for a vacation or building up an emergency fund.

Users pay installments into a pot for a set period of time and can choose when they receive their money.

With the global FinTech industry set to be valued at over $310Billion in a couple of years and the budding FinTech space in Nigeria worth over half a billion dollars, financial services have never been easier to access for the people.

In a 2017 report, it was estimated that over 60% of customers will be using their mobile phones to access financial services, with the FinTech industry at the helm of that innovation.

Moyalo has just recorded 8,000 Users on its community perform services like thrifting and personal saving daily since product launch. The company reached the N100 million transaction milestone in the last quarter in 2020.

Part of Moyalo's vision is digitizing rotational savings “Ajo/Esusu” and promoting personal savings discipline. As a consumer-centric brand, Moyalo takes its users' feedback seriously which has helped build a strong KYC that guarantees all money borrowed to users are remitted or recovered promptly.

Describing how it works, Mrs Felicia Ikotun; Head of Convenient Services said, "While we believe that lots of Nigerians are naive about lending money to strangers or friends for a rotational turn remittance at no interest. Moyalo has taken strides to ensure that all thrifting activities managed by Moyalo Admin are 100% secured and risk free. The platform offers a guaranteed protection policy by ensuring the rotational savings activities are completed. Furthermore, the Moyalo debt recovery team ensures the payments are made by the defaulting debtors with a penalty charge while Moyalo steps into the space of such members to complete their rotational activities.

However, using the “thrift managed by third parties” does not guarantee the former as the platform assumes the parties are a group of people (Cooperative society, friends, Colleagues, Religious group) who can manage all issues with themselves but need to rely on our technology to make savings smarter and easy.

Daily, weekly and monthly, we see Nigerians confidently complete their thrift without stress and that encourages us to ensure we make the community a safe and secure place for all savers and lenders."

Users are verified before permitting access for withdrawal to ensure they are KYC and regulatory complaint, and, most importantly, security of other savers funds in the money pool. Our growth can be connected to our non-financial partners who help us accredit a social score to all users to enable us to peer members to a cycle in reaching a collective financial goal.

Members are not expected to get interest or win anything after the process but rather attain social satisfaction towards their needs and financial projections. The platform is based on the traditional “Rotating savings and Credit Associations (ROSCA) concept” which ensures members save through the use of collective pressure by keeping aside a fixed amount from their regular income.

Moyalo makes saving more socially interactive without having to pay higher debt or interest.

We believe if you earn trust with our community, you won't need to pay interest to access finance. - Moyalo

The company hopes to attract the millennial audience who are already drawn to social apps in the Fintech space like Cowrywise, Piggyvest and more.

In addition, younger generations are faced with varieties of financial struggles like cost of living, starting a business, health issues, access to mobility, emergency expenses etc. and find it difficult to save alone.

With support from World Bank, The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) recently released the “2019 Poverty and Inequality in Nigeria” report, which highlights that 40 percent of the total population, or almost 83 million people and live below the country’s poverty line of 137,430 naira ($381. 75) per year - (source: World Bank Official website - May 28,2020).

This inspired the building of Moyalo, a digital world version of a centuries old community savings tool that we hope provides a solution to a new generation.