Moya Money

A large number of small businesses in South Africa are managed by a single individual. They face the challenge of being the single point of responsibility for managing finances in their business, but struggle to do so using existing solutions. 

Our solution is a money management platform for these sole traders which enables them to; connect their bank account to track sales & expenses, send invoices to customers, calculate how much they can pay themselves & how much they can save in the account and finally help them with their tax estimates.  

This is important as this segment of small business owner is heavily reliant on their enterprise for monthly income, as many sole traders started their operation because they lost their job or were unable to secure one. Being able to manage their enterprise and it's finances will directly impact their own personal well-being.  

Africa has a high proportion of small business owners who manage an enterprise all on their own. They are an estimated 44 million small businesses in Africa, 71% of registered businesses in Africa consist of individual entrepreneurs. 

The "solopreneur" is also something which occurs in South Africa as, 39% of all registered small businesses in South Africa are owned and operations are managed by a single individual. The challenge they face is they struggle to manage their finances using existing solutions. Accounting software has a full stack of features that they don't need such as payroll. Current financial management tools which they use like spreadsheets, notepads or bank statements take them 5hrs-6hrs a month to consolidate their finances in one place as this approach is manual and also very paper based. Finally they also struggle to calculate their tax and this is the primary reason they pay an accountant, they pay an accountant between $65 - $250 to help them calculate tax. 

The scale of this problem in South Africa is large as the majority of small business owners do not keep financial records, 70% of all these registered small businesses don't keep financial records.

Our solution is a money management platform for sole traders enabling them to take control of their finances. Our solution enables sole traders to connect their bank account, track their sales & expenses, send invoices to clients & customers, set how much income they will pay themselves and calculate how much tax they owe. This is done by assisting these sole traders with consolidating their financial information and through doing this enabling them to make these decisions on their finances.

This solution is delivered through a data-free mobile application which sole traders can download on their mobile devices.

Our solution is targeted towards sole traders, gig economy workers  and the self-employed. These are essentially individuals who own and run their enterprise by themselves, and there is no legal distinction between them and their business entity. This structure suits many enterprises in South Africa due to their simple operations, size of their operations and minimal capital required to run their operation.

This is mainly due to the socio-economic conditions which they find themselves in, the majority of sole traders in South Africa are survivalist meaning they have to pursue entrepreneurship or start their own enterprise because they struggle to secure employment. The declining levels in economic activity results in an increasing dependency on self-employment or starting an enterprise to generate income. This is also being accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic, as people who have lost their formal employment are becoming sole proprietors or sole traders as a source of income.

This segment is currently underserved because they have different financial management needs than your “typical” small business. Sole traders have the primary objective of supporting themselves or their families. Accounting software does not properly serve this segments needs as solutions are positioned towards auditing. Offering features such as payroll, advanced inventory management etc which this segment does not need. They interact with financial management tools whether it is a notepad or software based solutions differently, as their needs are ensuring business costs are tracked and covered, saving money at the end of each month and paying themselves a salary. They require a solution which can help them categorise personal and business finances since they are so closely tied to their enterprise.  

We are understanding this segments needs through running experiments. We reach them through on the ground activations and partnerships with other organisations who either serve this market themselves or run enterprise development programs to support this segment. We are now at the stage where we are scaling our once-off experiments into pilots which will run for a longer period.

Our mission at Moya Money is extending the reach and quality of digital financial services. We aim to achieve the goal of digital inclusion by putting the ability to access financial services in every sole traders pocket. By being able to access a money management tool, this market segment will have their business finances consolidated and will also relieve the stress of how to use income to pay their personal bills. 

We are at the pilot stage as now we have agreed partnerships with Saseka, Versofy, Wot-if Trust and Ubuntu Business to pilot our solution with their sole traders. The first pilots we will be running are with Saseka & Wot-if Trust.

Saseka is South Africa's beauty stylist booking service that connects ethnic women to salon-quality stylists. Saseka provides meaningful work for stylists and we will be running a 8 week pilot with 5 of their stylists providing them our MVP which is currently a mobile app and testing how it addresses the problem we've identified.

The second pilot we will be running is with Wot-if-Trust an organisation that runs enterprise development programmes in the township of Diepsloot. Our team will be joining their workshops to deliver content on financial management and will offer our MVP to the 22 enterprises who are part of their programme.

What makes our solution innovative or unique in solving the problem is viewing it as a problem which affects the "individual" behind the enterprise, and the enterprise itself. This approach enables us to deliver a unique value proposition to sole traders. We also aim to provide a smart invoicing solution within our mobile application which will enable users to be paid digitally. 

Sole traders have functional and emotional pain points, such as having to worry about paying bills like rent, electricity and groceries. When most receive income from rendering services, they think about covering business expenses but also factor in paying these bills or personal expenses. Our solution is not developed on an "ideal" of how a sole trader should manage their finances and do their bookkeeping, but rather built on their real jobs which they are trying to get done in their enterprise and their personal lives. 

This makes our approach different as most bookkeeping solutions just focus on being a financial management solution for the enterprise, and personal financial management tools are tailored for individuals with formal employment. 

This segment of sole traders also do not use channels such as a website or email and mainly communicates with clients through WhatsApp, this affects how they are billed. Our mobile money management solution will enable sole traders to send through a smart digital invoice for their services, which can will have a payment option so they can be paid directly by their clients.   

• Our solution is currently serving 15 sole traders, we're in the problem solution fit phase and running prototyped experiments with this selected group of participants and using their consistent feedback from the tests to build our MVP.
• We aim to serve 1500 - 1600 South African sole traders through our solution or have them on our platform in year from now. 
• In five years time we aim to serve 1.5 million sole traders through our solution and to have scaled to neighbouring African countries impacting more sole traders on the continent. 

The measurable indicators we will be using to measure the progress or impact of our solution are mainly Monthly Active Usage metrics such as;

• Average visit time per day
• App session intervals
• How many invoices were sent through the platform
• The amount of invoice payments processed through the app
• How many users met their savings target

From a high level startup impact we are aligned with SDG 8 which is Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all. We are aiming to promote inclusive work and enterprise for sole traders and measure progress of doing this with the target of;

• Target 8.2: Achieve higher levels of economic productivity through diversification, technological upgrading and innovation, including through a focus on high-value added and labour-intensive sectors
• Target 8.10: Strengthen the capacity of domestic financial institutions to encourage and expand access to banking, insurance and financial services for all

Thulani Masebenza - CEO

Boipelo Zuma - CTO 

Sabica Pardesi - Head of Product

Trinity Chauke - UX/UI Designer

Thulani is a former management consultant and worked in Ernst & Young's Strategy Consulting practice. He mainly worked on financial services projects such as a project investigating the feasibility of creating a State Owned Bank to offer financial services products to small businesses. He also co-founded and built a non-profit organisation called Young Aspiring Thinkers. Which has impacted over 800 high school learners, have over 50 mentors in their database, have partnered with Oracle, Unilever and Münster Business School.  

Boipelo was a technical co-founder and Android developer for a start-up project he pursued in university called GrubCrunch, a food-based platform that strives to offer affordable meals to South Africa’s working class from nearby restaurants. The project at its peak attracted 5 000 users and partnered with 5 local restaurants.

Sabica is currently finishing her Masters in Digital Business. She helped start The Consulting Academy which is a student-run consulting firm for students with high academic achievement and commitment. As Head of Business Development & Marketing and helped secure $20000 in partnerships for the club. She previously worked at Uprise.Africa which at the time was South Africa's first Equity Crowdfunding platform, Sabica was Head of Marketing & Business Development. 

Trinity is a UX/UI Designer at Explore and also has startup entrepreneurial experience. His highlight was working on a mobile application with co-founders called AtCampus in university which was a finalist for the prestigious MTN Business App of the Year Awards.

Our team is really inspired to become a Solver because we aim to build an impactful startup which is solving for financial inclusion at the bottom of the pyramid in the small business segment, but also aim to build a viable and sustainable business model for this. 

Solve could help our startup not only overcome the barriers we are facing but also contribute to the vision of Moya Money if we got into the 9-month program, specifically with; 

• Enabling us the opportunity to pitch to investors who have experience scaling similar financial services solutions and have deeper insight into the problem we aim to address.
• Enabling us to learn from other Digital Inclusion solution across the world, from my entrepreneurial journey so far I've learned just how valuable it is to learn from like-minded individuals. There's so much to learn not only from the Solve team but also from the participants part of the program.
• Receiving mentorship and access to grant capital from the Solve network to help scale the solution and begin tackling the problem at a larger scale.