Digital Stokvel infrastructure for South African financial institutions
Are you a bank, fintech or financial institution in South Africa?
Stokvels are already digital. The opportunity is to make them better.
A Stokvel bank account can hold the group’s money, but the experience of saving together involves much more than the account itself.
It’s important to consider things like: How do members know what has been paid? What happens when a contribution is missed?
How are new members invited? What rules does this particular Stokvel follow? How do members stay engaged between contributions and payouts?
Circles powered by StepLadder helps banks, fintechs and financial institutions build configurable collaborative savings experiences around the way people already save together.
Build around the group, not just the transaction
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Create different Circle structures, onboarding journeys and rules for different use cases and customer groups.
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Manage Circle participants and operators, with clear visibility over membership and group activity.
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Track payments in and out, balances and missed payments, with payment infrastructure integrated into the wider customer journey.
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Give your teams the tools to manage Circles, participants and performance through a hosted administration portal.
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Connect lifecycle communications to your existing CRM, helping customers understand what is happening and what they need to do next.
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See how Circles and participants are performing, identify friction and continually improve the experience.
Your customers are already saving together…
The Stokvel has been part of South African financial life for generations.
This behaviour reaches far beyond South Africa. Around the world, people save together in hundreds of variations of the same basic model, known locally as Ajo, Chama, Susu, Tanda, Committee and hundreds of other names.
Build on that familiarity to create a digital proposition designed around your commercial objective, whether that's attracting new customers, increasing engagement, growing deposits or creating a more distinctive savings experience.
Why build with StepLadder?
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Specialist technology
Purpose-built infrastructure for running and managing digital Savings Circles, designed to integrate into your existing ecosystem.
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Product expertise
Use what we've already learned about Circle design, onboarding, payments, engagement and customer behaviour.
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Built to test and evolve
Configure different journeys, rules and Circle structures so you can learn what works for your customers and develop the proposition over time.
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More than a software supplier
We work alongside product and growth teams from proposition design and integration through launch, optimisation and scale.
We've taken banks from idea to scale
When Nigerian digital bank Carbon wanted to launch a fully digital Ajo, we worked with its teams to configure the proposition, integrate Circles with its CRM and payment infrastructure, develop the go-to-market strategy and optimise the customer journey after launch.
Six months after launch, Carbon Circles was 330% ahead of target volumes.
Product changes based on live customer behaviour produced a 400% overnight improvement in sign-up uptake, while referrals later generated more than a third of new sign-ups.
What could Circles do for your business?
You don't need to have the proposition worked out before we talk.
Start with the outcome. What do you want?
More customers?
Greater engagement?
Deposit growth?
A differentiated Stokvel proposition?
A new collaborative-savings product?
We'll help you explore where Savings Circles could fit, what you'd need to test and what a sensible route to market could look like.
Not ready for a conversation yet?
Download our Digital Stokvel Product Checklist to explore the questions your product team should consider before building a collaborative-savings proposition.