Fintech community
Building the rails real money moves on.
Most of the customers live on mobile money, thin credit files and patchy connectivity. Settlement windows, agent networks, regulator sandboxes and fraud rings are the daily work, not edge cases.
Open to every member. Join now and help shape what it builds next.
What we work on
Four problems define this community’s work right now. Every sprint, review and essay here comes back to one of them.
Payments and reconciliation
Mobile money, card and bank rails stitched together, with ledgers that still balance when a callback arrives twice or never.
Credit for thin files
Scoring people the bureaus cannot see, from transaction and airtime data, in ways a regulator can audit.
Fraud and risk
Real-time decisions in milliseconds, SIM-swap and account-takeover defence, and audit trails that hold up.
Micro-insurance and merchant tools
Cover priced for the customers traditional insurers never reached, and checkout tools for small merchants selling online.
Questions we are working through
No one has settled these yet. They come up in every sprint, and members argue them out in essays and reviews.
- How do you score someone who has never had a bank account, without excluding them for the same reason?
- When a mobile money callback never arrives, which system is the source of truth, and how fast can you prove it?
- What does a fraud model owe the honest customer it blocks by mistake?
Our impact
- Systems in Fintech we have built and shipped
- 4
Shipped in Fintech
- DhamanaFraud Detection · Nigeria · 2023
Real-time transaction scoring with a full audit trail — Kafka-native and horizontally scaled.
<50ms decision latency40k events / minute - RafikiConversational Banking · Nigeria · 2024
A WhatsApp-native banking assistant for balances, transfers, and support, grounded on core-banking data.
68% queries self-served900k active users - AkibaMicro-savings · Tanzania · 2024
A goal-based micro-savings and lending app with automated M-Pesa top-ups and credit scoring.
$4.2M saved by users210k wallets - DataBridgeAPI Infrastructure · Pan-African · 2022
A unified integration layer wiring legacy banking and ERP systems to modern SaaS and fintech APIs.
99.97% uptime40+ live connectors
From the field
No essays here yet. Members write about what actually happens on the ground, and every essay is edited before it is published. Apply to write
Your first build
New members pick one of these for their first month. Each is small enough to finish and real enough to show an employer or an investor.
A reconciliation engine
Match a day of mobile money statements against a ledger, flag every mismatch and explain why it happened.
- Python
- Postgres
- Idempotency
A thin-file credit score
Score loan applicants from transaction history alone, then write the one-page note a credit committee would need to trust it.
- ML
- Feature engineering
- Model cards
A SIM-swap alarm
Detect a likely account takeover in the minutes after a SIM change, before money moves.
- Streaming
- Risk rules
- Event design
Words you will hear
New here? These come up in your first week. Plain meanings, no jargon.
- Float
- The cash and e-money an agent holds to serve customers. Run out of either and the agent turns people away.
- KYC tiers
- Levels of identity checks. Lighter checks unlock smaller limits, so people can start with what they have.
- Reconciliation
- Proving that what your ledger says happened matches what the bank or telco says happened, transaction by transaction.
- Chargeback
- A payment reversed after a dispute. The merchant loses the money and usually a fee as well.
Who you will meet
- Backend and data engineers on payment systems
- Risk, credit and compliance analysts
- Founders building on mobile money
- Product people at banks, MFIs and SACCOs
How the community runs
- Every week
Build sprint
Bring a real problem from your work in the sector. Leave with progress, reviewed by people who have shipped the same thing.
- Every week
Office hours
Drop in with a model that will not converge, a regulator question or a hiring decision. Practitioners answer.
- Every month
Demo day
Members show working systems to the community, mentors and invited investors. Demos, not decks.
The team behind it
Lead the Fintech community
We are looking for experienced practitioners to lead this community: host one session a month, review members’ work and shape what it builds next.
Tell us about your workJoin the Fintech community
One payment of $15 makes you a member for life: every community, its sprints, reviews and events. No subscription.