Moya

Moya is a financial management platform for small businesses and self-employed individuals which allows them to collect data-collection and submit a financial platform to lenders if they don't have financial statements.

Financial statements serve as a barrier to entry for small businesses, especially micro businesses trying to access capital in emerging markets. The reality is that financial statements were not created to help businesses apply for loans and serve more as a regulatory document to help businesses submit tax returns and ensure they can be audited. 

We are proposing a solution which will allow any small business owner the ability to upload their businesses financial information and present that profile to lenders, to enable them to gain better insight and understanding of their company. 

We are solving the challenge of access to capital for micro businesses in South Africa. Access to finance is one of the main challenges which small businesses in South Africa face. Small business owners in total request R40 billion in funding each year, but only about 25% of small business loans are successful. The total finance gap for small businesses is estimated to be R346 billion.

This is primarily driven by the fact that small business owners in South Africa do not have financial statements because they are not compulsory, yet many lenders ask for them in their loan application process. This barrier makes it difficult for small business owners to apply for loans. Not because this financial information does not exist but is captured in other forms such as; notebooks which they use to track sales or inventory, point-of-sale devices and paper based invoice books.

This problem affects 3.4 million micro small businesses in South Africa as many can't afford financial statements and have no alternative solution.

Our solution is a financial data-collection platform for micro small businesses, which allows them to apply for funding using their operating history if they lack financial statements. This will allow micro businesses to build a financial profile for lenders so they can assess their businesses better. 

Our solution is a web-based application which small business owners can access through our website. Once they have created an account they will have to input their financial information either manually or can upload information such as CSV files from point-of-sale devices or bank statements. Once they've completed this step our platform will generate a financial profile which they can then use to apply for a loan at a Moya lending partner. 

You can think of our solution as a "Sign Up with Google" but for loan applications. This whole process will be enabled by providing a web-based application service to small business owners and an API to lenders, allowing them to add this functionality in their online application processes.

Our solution is targeted towards micro small businesses in South Africa. These small businesses on average have an annual turnover of R0 - R1.5 million ($88 000) and usually have 1-2 owners. The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor Report states that most small businesses in South Africa in this category are 'survivalist' businesses, which means they were started because the owners struggled to find employment and had to create their own source of income. This is why helping them access finance is so important as many of these businesses do not have the time or resources to prepare audited financial statements. 

Due to covid-19 our main channel through which we engage these businesses is online. We have built a landing page (www.moya.africa) to allow them to subscribe to our waiting list to test our prototype. Also once they have signed up to the waiting list we do customer interviews with them or send them an online survey to better understand their needs.

Key channels in engaging them online has also been Facebook Groups such 'SA Business Forum', 'Young Black Entrepreneurs in South Africa' and SME South Africa. Collectively these groups have about 3 million users.

Our solution relates to the challenge theme of Inclusive Entrepreneurship. Micro businesses lack tools which help access capital. Our solution is enabling an alternative means of applying for finance for a target group which traditionally does not have their businesses information collected in a formal way to present to lenders. Through technology we're allowing them the ability to record their information digitally, which will allow them financial access.

Our solution is innovative because there is currently no alternative to help small businesses out with a loan application if they don't have financial statements or formal management accounts. They either have to go through the expensive process of paying an account to organize their financial statements so they have financial readiness, or apply at a lending institution which uses innovative credit scoring models. The industry of innovative scoring for small businesses is still taking off in Africa and South Africa. 

Our competitors are loan matching platforms and loan origination platforms. In South Africa these are platforms such as; FinFind, Hippo.co.za, Peerfin and FundingHub. Our competitive advantage over these solutions is that they mainly focus on linking a small business to the best possible loan, which matches their needs. We help small businesses build a financial profile and help lenders gain insight into these small businesses. 

We also have a competitive advantage by offering our API to lenders to insert in their application process.

This will allow for financial inclusion and empower businesses with the tools to access finance, especially because financial statements is a barrier for so many small businesses which prevents them from even completing loan applications. 

Our core technology is software, as our offering to small businesses and lenders would be delivered through the web. Our offering to small businesses is a web-based application which will allow them to upload their information. Our offering to lenders is an API which they can insert in their online application process to be able to receive financial profiles coming from Moya, as well as a loan-management offering which will allow them to manage leads from Moya. 

We’re prototyping a solution which will allow small business owners to capture financial data which they’ve recorded in the past or enable them to record their day-to-day activities to help them build a credit profile which they can present to lenders. The vision is to put the ability to access finance in every business owners’ pocket. 

Through engaging small business owners, we’ve found that most struggle with loan applications because of annual financial statements. Small business owners won’t go through the pain of hiring an account to produce financial statements for them, just so they can apply for a loan and this process would be too expensive for them as well. For lenders, bank statements just don’t give enough of a view of what is happening inside of a business and few will even consider offering a loan to a small business which doesn’t have financial statements. Our solution aims to close this information gap by allowing small business owners to capture financial data. This will give a more accurate picture of their business and insight into their operations when they’re applying for loans.

Our theory of change is that a high number of small businesses can actually qualify funding because they actually have good financial behaviour and have healthy cashflow. However this information is not captured formally in a system or is not captured digitally. We believe by providing technology to enable these business owners to capture information will give them access to finance, where they were previously being excluded due to lack of formal documents.

We have three full-time members of the startup team. The team includes myself, Boipelo Zuma and Bill Seota

Thulani Masebenza - Is an entrepreneur before his entrepreneurial journey he was a management consultant at Ernst & Young. He studied a BA in International Relations & Politics at the University of Witwatersrand and a PDM at Wits Business School. He is also the co-founder of a social enterprise Young Aspiring Thinkers which pitched at the ChangeNow Summit in Paris. He has experience leading early stage teams

Boipelo Zuma - Is a software developer. His specialties is in Android Programming and he has applied his skills to build a mobile application for Safecyber Life and his previous startup GrubCrunch. GrubCrunch helped to provide access to cheaper food for students at university who struggled financially. Boipelo also worked at First National Bank as a test specialist before pursuing entrepreneurship.

Bill Seota -  Is a a  Masters in Computer Science student whose passion lies in Data Science  particularly algorithms for multivariate data analysis. Bill has experience in the financial services industry working as an intern at JP Morgan

Our team is uniquely positioned to solve this problem because we all have an underlying understand or experience in financial services. We are also part of AlphaCode, which is South Africa's largest fintech incubator. This has given our team the ability to access mentorship and contacts in the financial services world so we can better understand the problem we are solving.

• A part of AlphaCode's Explore cohort which focuses on incubating early stage fintech ideas
• MasterCard Masterpass, we pitched our offering to MasterCard as we're interested in testing our solution with their MasterPass Merchants. Our team has currently been granted access to their sandbox environment for startups to use their APIs

We provide value to small business owners as well as lenders or financial institutions. For small businesses we provide a free web-based application which will allow them to build a financial profile which they can use to apply for a loan at a Moya Lending partner if they don't have financial statements. The offering to small businesses is free and they are not charged to use our solution.

Our offering to lenders or financial institutions is an API which they can insert in their online application process to help give small business owners without financial statements an alternative option to upload financial information about their business. We'll also provide them a loan management dashboard to manage these leads and financial profiles coming from small businesses. 

We'll make revenue from this by charging a subscription fee to financial institutions for using our infrastructure, as well as a small commission fee on successful loan applicants who apply using our infrastructure. 

Small businesses will want our offering because financial readiness is a massive barrier preventing them from accessing finance, many small businesses don't use accounting software to manage their financial information and thus can't successfully apply for financing. Financial institutions will want to use our offering because they do want to provide more funding to small businesses but because they can't gain insight into how small businesses are managed they can't accurately assess the risk involved with providing them a loan.

Our path to financial sustainability will come initially from grant funding. As mentioned our team is part of a fintech incubator but they use a model where they provide grant funding to cover founders salaries so they can pursue their idea. 

We are now look to raise seed capital whether it is through a grant or investment. This initial capital will allow our team to further build out our product from a prototype idea to something which we can test in the market.