Problem
Small-ticket credit gets gated on paperwork most borrowers do not have: a payslip, a formal bank account, something to pledge. Lenders score on paper, so the applicants carrying the least documentation get priced out instead of assessed.
They are not unbanked, though. They already transact, over USSD and mobile wallets, because that is where the money actually moves for them. The gap is not access to financial services. It is that the lenders serving this market will not underwrite a customer who cannot produce a document trail.
Process
Three things had to work as a single product: microloans, buy-now-pay-later, and the financial tooling around them. Underwriting was the hard part, because the applicants arrive with the thinnest paper trail of any customer a lender normally sees.
Payment is where the product meets reality. A borrower frequently has no bank account to fund from, so settlement runs over USSD and mobile wallets, and every step has to survive a dropped connection and resume later on the same phone.
Underneath it is TypeScript end to end: React in the client, Node.js and REST APIs behind it, MongoDB holding the records a lender actually has to keep.
Result
Running since May 2025 and still active, covering microloans and BNPL with settlement over USSD and mobile wallets.