L-Pesa was founded with the vision to improve people's live through efficient access to credit and related financial services. The first service offered by L-Pesa is micro lending. L-pesa was launched in Tanzania in 2016 and already issued over 38,000 loans. Over time, L-Pesa expects to introduce additional financial services that would appeal to its user base, such as money transfer.
The company has a focus on automation 95% of the user acquistion and loan underwriting process is automated and is therefore exteremly scalabe. The user exprience is based on mobile and web interfaces and marketing is primarily accomplished via social media and SMS.
L-Pesa has built a proprietary credit underwriting system which is one of the keys to its success. Consumer credit reporting as it is available in Western Europe and North America does not exist in Africa or other developing regions. A number of models have been tried over the years, some with more success than others.
The credit score is also impacted by other factors, such as completion of identity verfication. Nevertheless, L-Pesa relies on other service providers to screen users, in its current markets, L-pesa customers are reqiured to have established accounts with mobile money service providers such as M-pesa prior to setting up auto approved, but some require manual review. The process by which L-Pesa has achieved this success is described with the steps below:
