NewTech Friday: ComGrow – Re-designing village banking
ComGrow was among the firms selected for the LHOFT 2022 Catapult Inclusion Africa Program. Mkuzo Kuwani, ComGrow’s Co-Founder and CEO, tells us more about the Zambia fintech firm and how they digitize informal savings and credit groups between friends and family networks, offering a multitude of opportunities to make people’s money productive.
ComGrow was among the firms selected for the LHOFT 2022 Catapult Inclusion Africa Program. Mkuzo Kuwani, ComGrow’s Co-Founder and CEO, tells us more about the Zambia fintech firm and how they digitize informal savings and credit groups between friends and family networks, offering a multitude of opportunities to make people’s money productive.
Mkuzo, before we get started, let's do a video pitch for our very busy readers who don't have time to read. Can you introduce ComGrow in less than a minute?
What led to the creation of ComGrow?
In Africa, many don’t have access to formal financial services. Instead, they bank together as a community by collectivizing their savings, borrowing against those savings, and after that repaying with interest.
The problem is that these savings groups are informally run, which makes them inefficient and unsecure. These groups cannot turn to unreachable and costly formal banks, and the manual accounting methods are prone to human error, alongside the risk of theft of funds, which is very common.
After hearing many stories of difficulties faced by people from different groups, it was evident that something needed to be done to improve a system with a lot of potential to improve financial inclusion.
Could you present ComGrow’s offer?
ComGrow empowers savings groups by digitizing their financial activities.
This is done via an application that is a fully interoperable solution, combining automated accounting services with digital transactional services. With our payment partner, Kazang, we enable our users to transact securely via any mobile money wallet, and have real time access to their financial records within their groups.
By leveraging technology to create a mobile application that consolidates all functions of savings group operations, our unique data management system with payment integrations makes savings groups more efficient, secure and convenient for users, further allowing users access to the digital financial market.
What's coming next for ComGrow?
We are currently live-testing our application under supervision by the Bank of Zambia in their Regulatory Sandbox until September 2023.
Alongside this, we are looking for strategic partners to help fulfil our ‘path to financial inclusion’ value chain, which involves integrating people into the digital financial world, educating them and providing financial and non-financial services.
Furthermore, we are developing a B2B version of our product offering, which will allow us to serve a different and wider customer segment.
We expect to fully launch our product in the public market by December 2023.
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