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FintechGroup Savings & LendingMobile MoneyTogo · Kenya · Nigeria

Digitizing Africa's Savings Circles: Group Wallets, Peer Lending & Mobile Money

Client: Ohana Africa (Haagbo Inc) — "Fintech for Groups." Ohana turns informal community savings systems — tontines, chamas, susus — into a transparent digital platform. BixoSoft develops the product across its Flutter app, backend, payment integrations, lending engine and admin dashboard.

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Launch markets: Togo, Kenya & Nigeria
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Payment rails integrated: TMoney, M-Pesa, Ecobank & cards
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Languages: full English & French experiences
TrustScore
Behaviour-based trust engine powering peer lending
The Challenge
Hundreds of millions of people save through informal groups — families, churches, coworkers, funeral societies — managed with notebooks, cash and trust. The model works socially but fails technically: no transparency, no records, no protection against mismanagement, and no bridge to loans or formal finance. Digitizing it means rebuilding group governance, shared money and community lending in software — on unreliable networks, across currencies and languages.
The Solution
A community-finance platform engineered by BixoSoft: group savings with manager-controlled governance, a multi-balance wallet architecture, peer-supported lending driven by a TrustScore, and integrations across mobile money, banking and cards. A Flutter app and web administration dashboard, bilingual and offline-resilient, with the transaction-safety engineering of a real fintech underneath.

The Challenge

Take a financial tradition older than banks — and make it digital without breaking the trust that holds it together.

In much of Africa, the savings group is the real financial institution. Families pool emergency funds, churches collect contributions, entrepreneurs raise capital and funeral societies support bereaved members. These systems run on social trust — but a notebook cannot prove a balance, a treasurer can disappear, and a member's years of faithful contributions earn no credit history.

Digitizing this is far harder than building a wallet app. Money in a savings group is shared money: it belongs to a group, sits in pools, and can only move when the right people approve. The software must encode governance — managers, supervisors, approval workflows, disbanded-group rules — not just transactions.

The environment adds its own constraints: three countries with different currencies and payment systems (TMoney in Togo, M-Pesa in Kenya, banking rails such as Ecobank, plus cards), French- and English-speaking users, and mobile networks where connectivity drops mid-transaction. A payment that silently retries into a double-withdrawal isn't a bug — it's a community's emergency fund gone wrong.

What We Built

Group finance, wallet infrastructure, lending and operations — one platform, engineered module by module.

Groups, Pools & Governance

The social structure of a tontine, encoded in software.

  • Group creation, discovery, invitations and member management for families, churches, coworkers, investment clubs and community causes
  • Savings pools with goals, schedules, contributions and interest rules per group configuration
  • Governance by design: minimum two group managers, supervisors for organisational groups, and manager approval for withdrawals, expenses and disbursements
  • Lifecycle rules for inactive pools and disbanded groups, so dormant structures can't leak money

Multi-Balance Wallet Architecture

Far more than a single balance — a layered money system.

  • User wallets, group wallets, pool balances, subwallets and express accounts, each with defined transfer paths
  • A full transfer matrix: subwallet↔subwallet, subwallet↔express, wallet→pool contributions, member disbursements, expenses and cash-outs
  • Source and destination selection, verification, receipts and error handling on every money movement
  • Currency-aware transaction limits and multi-currency management with live rate refresh

Payment Rails Across Three Markets

Every market pays differently — the platform speaks to all of them.

  • TMoney (Togo): wallet funding, withdrawals, loan repayments and disbursements, with idempotent credits and a unique reference per attempt
  • M-Pesa (Kenya): loan and payment flows for East Africa's dominant mobile money
  • Ecobank transfers and card deposits via secure payment webview with verification and receipts
  • Internal wallet movements as the architectural backbone, so external rails are called only when money truly enters or leaves

Peer Lending & TrustScore

Turning savings behaviour into access to credit.

  • Loan applications with peer recommendations — members vouch for each other, digitally
  • Repayment schedules, upcoming and late repayment tracking, and repayment through TMoney, wallets or subwallets
  • TrustScore engine linking saving behaviour and loan history to lending decisions and limits
  • Group-level lending controls: interest settings, and automatic exclusion of inactive or non-saving pools from issuing loans

Reliability for Real-World Networks

Built for markets where connectivity is a feature, not a given.

  • Offline-aware session handling, connectivity banners and safe navigation during network drops
  • OTP payment verification, account validation before transactions, and device-ID handling
  • Double-submit prevention and idempotency across money-moving endpoints — including a hardened fix eliminating double-withdrawal risk
  • Identity-verification flows protecting accounts and transactions

App, Dashboard & Support

The complete product surface, in two languages.

  • Flutter mobile application with full French and English experiences
  • Web administration dashboard: users, countries, currencies, payment-gateway settings, loan settings, organisations, groups and withdrawals
  • Real-time support chat over WebSockets, with voice-message capability
  • Transactional notifications for loans, recommendations, withdrawals and group activity

How a Group Saves on Ohana

The platform mirrors how savings circles already work — then adds the transparency and safety the notebook never had:

A member creates a group and invites family, colleagues or their community managers and supervisors are appointed savings pools are created with goals and schedules members contribute from wallets, mobile money, bank or card balances and activity are visible to the members they concern withdrawals, expenses and loans are requested — and approved by managers repayments and behaviour feed each member's TrustScore

Every movement of money passes through verification, approval and an auditable transaction record — the difference between digitizing trust and merely digitizing cash.

The Results

Ohana is a production fintech platform with live financial workflows — and an architecture ready for its multi-country ambitions.

Production

Live financial workflows, in the field

Real contributions, withdrawals, disbursements and loan repayments flow through the platform's wallets and payment rails — tested and hardened against the failure modes of real money movement.

3 markets

One codebase, three countries' payment realities

TMoney, M-Pesa, Ecobank and card rails are unified behind one wallet architecture, with currency-aware limits and country management built into the admin dashboard.

Trust, encoded

Governance that communities can rely on

Two-manager minimums, supervisor roles, approval workflows and member-visible transactions replace the opaque notebook — while TrustScore turns years of faithful saving into credit access for the first time.

Fintech-grade

Transaction safety engineered in

Idempotent payment credits, unique per-attempt references, OTP verification, double-withdrawal elimination and offline-safe sessions — the unglamorous engineering that makes shared money trustworthy.

Key Takeaway

Ohana isn't a UI for tracking savings — it's community governance, multi-balance wallets, mobile-money rails and peer lending working as one system. BixoSoft builds fintech where the hardest requirement is trust.

Building a fintech, wallet or payments product?

We integrate mobile money, banks and cards behind clean wallet architectures — with the idempotency, verification and audit trails real money demands.