Data-driven SME credit for mobile money merchants in Ghana
Peswa provides data-driven working-capital credit to MTN Mobile Money (MoMo) merchants in Ghana. It targets a concrete bottleneck — agent and merchant liquidity — by offering short-duration float loans that are sized for day-to-day cashflow reality.
By underwriting on rich transaction data and embedding directly into existing telco and mobile money distribution, Peswa scales credit access without rebuilding trust from scratch, improving liquidity, volumes, and economic throughput.
How working-capital credit unlocks Africa's mobile money economy
Mobile money in Africa moves hundreds of billions of dollars a year, but the agents and SMEs who run it are constantly capital-constrained. A merchant who runs out of float can't pay customers; a customer who can't be paid stops transacting. Working-capital credit — short tenors, behavioural underwriting, embedded in the transaction stack — is the missing layer that makes the whole network work. Peswa is one of the clearest examples of onchain-adjacent credit infrastructure in our Simple Finance thesis, and a companion to the data we publish in Who's Really Using Stablecoins.
Why LAVA invested in Peswa
Credit is the oxygen of commerce, and in Africa it's often missing exactly where it's most needed: the agents and merchants who move money daily. Peswa's approach is pragmatic — short tenors, behaviourally informed underwriting, and unit economics that work at scale. With less than 2% defaults and roughly $10m lent per month, they are operating credit in markets no-one else can.
We also like infrastructure plays that sit upstream of many products. As Peswa expands across markets and use cases, it can become a foundational liquidity layer for payments and settlement networks, improving reliability for entire ecosystems that depend on mobile money.