Payment integrations are not your moat
If you are building a credit product, your moat is credit scoring. Not six months of M-Pesa, bank and card integrations. A note for fintech founders and the engineers who work for them.
FinoQ Team
Every fintech pitch deck has a slide about the product. Credit for market traders. Insurance for boda riders. A way for schools to collect fees. That slide is the moat.
Then the engineering plan arrives, and the first quarter is spent on none of it.
The plumbing tax
To operate correctly, a fintech in Kenya ends up needing the same plumbing as every other fintech:
- an M-Pesa integration, and usually Airtel Money too;
- one or more bank integrations for settlement;
- a paybill, a till, or both;
- a card processor for the customers who have cards;
- accounting sync so the books balance;
- eTIMS so the sales are fiscalised;
- and a way to verify the people you are onboarding and paying.
Built separately, that is months of work. Different providers, different docs, different sandboxes, different failure modes. And every one of them is yours to reconcile and monitor forever.
A parable
Imagine you are building a platform that digitises how people book cars for hire. That is your product. Now look at what you must also run:
- Verification of every business and driver you onboard, so there are no impersonators.
- Payment infrastructure for how partners collect and how they get settled.
- Settlement safety, so payouts go to the right mobile money and bank accounts every time.
- Accounting for the money flowing through, and tax filing on top.
Run correctly, that is at least four systems and about three dedicated staff, for a company whose reason to exist is car booking. Most businesses either run business lines that do not concern them, or skip them and carry the risk on manual processes.
Connect instead of build
FinoQ has already built these integrations. One integration reaches fifteen payment providers. Identity checks, eTIMS and Zoho Books sync run on the same API key. Everything in the dashboard is on the API, so there is no feature you have to ask for.
Already have Daraja credentials or a bank agreement? Bring them. Transactions run under your own provider accounts, and FinoQ is only the plumbing.
Every month spent on integrations is a month your actual product stands still. Configure the connection once and put the engineering time where the moat is.
Ship your product, not your plumbing. Read the developer overview.