I have come to believe WhatsApp might be the best channel anyone in African fintech has ever had access to. I say this as someone who spent years building on the opposite assumption. Financial inclusion has been a stated mission across our industry for a long time, and the results so far have been underwhelming enough that I recently found myself laughing about it on a panel.
I had been invited to speak at a financial inclusion event, and somewhere between the sessions a group of us started joking about how many tech bros, myself included, had gone off to build our apps for mobile phones. Every one of us believed our app would be the one to finally “bank the unbanked”.
Although we all might have had good intentions, every new app meant asking people to download, create an account, remember a password, and figure out an interface designed by someone who has never had to explain a loan to their grandma. The laughter in the room that day had the particular warmth of people recognising the same mistake in each other, and I left with a lot more to think about than I had arrived with.
Simple products spread on their own
Building for inclusion turned out to be far more complicated than any of us expected, and the one lesson I keep returning to is that people will find their way to a product once it is simple enough. People work out their own way in, usually by watching a friend (or some enemies) do it once or by asking a colleague at the next desk, and no tutorial or launch campaign has ever matched the speed of a neighbor saying, “just send it to me on WhatsApp”.
And recently I’ve begun looking at the market penetration of one app almost everyone I know already opens every day. I am sure some people, even toward the lower end of the income pyramid, do not use WhatsApp, and I cannot claim to know every household in every country where we work, but nearly every person I know has it. They check in when they have data, reply when they can, and the conversation is still there when they come back.
So here’s what I think; a product that fits into how people already communicate asks nothing new of them, and a lender trying to reach a first-time borrower has very little to lose by showing up in the app that borrower opens forty times a day, and I wish more of us had thought about it years ago.
Somebody else got there first, and I was a fan
Our own decision to build on WhatsApp was set off partly by a guy called Xara, who launched a similar product in payment either earlier this year or late last year; not too sure of when, as my memory has been corrupted by school feels and daddy day care things. We loved what he made and it propelled me to get in touch with him because I wanted to know how he had approached it, and since we already admired the product, I asked whether he would like to come over to Lendsqr or build something similar for us, of which he said no to both offers, because he was focused on his own product at the moment and had no interest in splitting his attention.
I respected his answer a great deal, because a founder with a clear sense of what he wants to work on, and one who knows his lane is a pleasure to deal with, even when he is turning down your offers one after the other.
His product also confirmed something I already suspected. Getting a loan is a harder problem than moving a payment, because credit involves trust, documentation, back-and-forth, and a lot of explaining. If a chat interface could make payments easier, I wanted to find out what it could do for borrowing.
So, we began to build ours
The project began with someone on my Growth team, who started building the first version before engineering dragged him over to their side, where he nonetheless continued building. The work he started became the foundation of what we have today, and the idea behind it is that a customer should be able to have their entire credit experience inside WhatsApp, wherever they happen to be that day. Our first version was rough in the way first versions tend to be. It behaved like USSD running inside WhatsApp, with numbered menus and fixed responses, and it did the job well enough for us to see the potential.
We then spent time polishing it into something people would want to open. Today you can talk to it the way you would talk to another person. You can send a voice note, send a screenshot of a document or a transfer, and write in whichever language you are most comfortable in, and it understands what you mean. It does not care how you spell anything, which matters a lot when you consider how many of us type in a hurry, on a small screen, in a second or third language. A few steps still use forms, onboarding being the main example, because some information has to be collected in a structured way.
Beyond that, the experience runs on conversation, and the mood we aim for is closer to chatting with a helpful friend. We have been trying to give it a personality and a helpful tone, and I will admit that part has some way to go before I am satisfied with it.
Why a chat feels safer than a bank branch
The question I care about most right now is how we help customers get the best access to credit, and my younger brother has taught me more about it than any research report. He is sophisticated and well-traveled, and he has seen how institutions work in several countries. Yet, I’d stake millions on the claim that there’s no one I know who hates banking halls more than he does.
A branch feels overwhelming to him, with staff who know the system inside out and customers who are expected to keep up without being told the rules. People like that tend to get run over in those settings. If a sophisticated, well-traveled man in his forties feels that way walking into a bank, I can only imagine how a first-time borrower feels when he is already nervous about asking and unsure whether he will be taken seriously. I think this explains a large share of the people who never engage with their banks at all, and I do not think we talk about it enough, because we tend to assume that people stay away for lack of information when plenty of them stay away because the experience makes them feel small.
A conversation on WhatsApp takes most of that pressure off. You can explain your situation to your lender or your bank in your own words and at your own pace, without anyone watching your face while you work up the courage to say what you need. You will not feel embarrassed or ashamed, since nobody is standing behind you in a queue and nobody is sighing at the hesitation in your voice. The chat can also ask you follow-up questions and guide you toward the option that suits your circumstances, which is a kind of attention that most application forms have never offered anyone. I would like us to create a safe space for people to engage with credit, a place where asking a basic question carries no cost, and I think a conversational channel on one of the most popular chat apps might be one of the best ways to build it.
What happens next, and where else this applies
Now that I’ve seen firsthand how much ground we can cover in reaching customers where they’re most comfortable, I sincerely hope other industry builders will build in this direction as well, because the more lenders who meet customers in conversation, the healthier the market becomes for everyone, including us.
For our part, we plan to make the product available to some of our lenders before the end of this month. And by December, it will be an option for all our lenders across the eight countries where we currently operate. We are doing this because we believe it is among the best things we can offer customers, and I would say the same even if nobody else were watching.
If we want to bring about financial inclusion, we have to build where people already are. Too often we get absorbed in designing for sophisticated audiences, and we forget that most of the people we claim to serve are on a very different footing from the people in our product meetings.
The same thinking applies well beyond lending, and if I had the balls and brain (-read as; 7+ years of med school) primary healthcare is the next area I would look at. WhatsApp could be a way to reach patients where they are, whether that means answering a first question about a symptom, sending appointment reminders, or helping someone work out whether a clinic visit is needed at all. Plenty of people put off care for months because the first step feels intimidating or expensive, and a familiar chat window lowers that first step considerably.I expect we will see more of this across sectors over the next few years, and I am looking forward to watching it happen.
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