Spoon Money Is Innovating The Stokvel Industry For Female Informal Traders
Spoon Money Is Innovating The Stokvel Industry For Female Informal Traders. Spoon Money aims to help South Africa’s female informal traders transform their businesses into sustainable micro-enterprises via tailored financial services. Spoon Money offers these entrepreneurs savings products and affordable lending tools through informal savings groups, or stokvels.
Spoon Money is leveraging stokvel principles – behaviours these business owners are already familiar with – to help them develop long-term savings habits and access to working capital. Spoon Money helps its users build sustainable, goal-based savings habits with a low minimum contribution of R100 per member per month, and offers access to loans at 3x the total group savings amount. These resources have the potential to help these women grow their businesses and develop long-term financial security.
Spoon Money also capitalises on the power of social networks, which helps ensure repayment while enabling women to build on the power of their collective savings to borrow more. A large proportion of women in South Africa belong to one or more stokvels. Many stokvels also become credit providers themselves by lending to individuals outside the stokvel (often at a rate of 30-50%).
The Spoon Money team interacts with their users on a daily basis, even offering ‘office hours’ for those that wish to meet face-to-face with a member of the team. Even though this “front end” interaction with customers remains personalised and non-digital, Spoon Money is working to streamline and automate the lending and savings process through technology. Ultimately, the team knows that these personal touches are important for trust and to delivering convenience that embeds Spoon Money into women’s existing habits and routines.
Understanding the needs and lifestyle of South Africa’s female informal traders they serve, Spoon Money makes it easy for them to deposit savings and pay back loans by offering a variety of payment options – including bank deposits, ATM, bank transfer, e-wallet, in-person during Spoon office hours via POS, and via local retail stores, which are easily accessible in townships.
While this group-lending methodology is not new, Spoon Money’s work to digitise and automate the process is. By innovating on existing habits and structures, supercharging them with technology and digital financial services, Spoon Money is modernising group-lending methodologies.
