Background

Musoni was born out of a desire to improve both the quality and accessibility of financial services available to poor Kenyans. Based in Nairobi but planning to expand all over Kenya, Musoni will enable clients to repay their loans and deposit their savings using existing mobile money transfer products, such as M-PESA, Zap and Orange Mobile Money. This has numerous advantages for our clients.

Rather than carry bundles of cash to their weekly meetings on the notoriously dangerous local minibuses, clients can repay their loans before the meeting on their phones. This means that the amount of time spent in meetings is significantly reduced. This allows Musoni clients to spend more time focusing on developing their businesses or looking after their families. Clients can also repay their loans at any time during the week, allowing them to repay after a particularly successful day at the business and removing the need to safely store their cash until the day of their meeting.

Musoni is at the cutting edge of microfinance in more ways than one. Responding to the fact that many MFIs struggle with the maintenance and handling of their MIS, we have taken the decision to base our back office operations in Holland, where the necessary expertise is more readily available than in the countries where we operate. This will also allow us, in the future, to move swiftly and efficiently into new countries. Our ambition is to quickly expand into any country with sufficient mobile banking infrastructure, initially beginning with Tanzania and Uganda.

Our Dutch holding company will also take care of both fundraising and part of control, removing many of the traditional headaches from the management on the ground. These efficiency savings combine with our use of mobile technology, allowing Musoni to charge a significantly lower interest rate to our clients than many of our rivals.

We at Musoni believe fundamentally in the importance of client interaction. We still rely upon the group-lending methodology and our success relies upon the hard work of our branch managers and loan officers who are responsible for working with our clients on a daily basis. In many respects in fact, we are a traditional MFI. Our aim is simply to take the traditional microfinance experience to the next level.