There are about 810,000 stokvels in South Africa. Over 11 million people belong to one. Together they put away an estimated R50 billion a year, according to the National Stokvel Association.
None of them is a bank. Every bank wants their money anyway.
The same is happening in Kenya and Egypt, with savings groups that are older than most of the banks now courting them. Banks, payment switches and apps are each building a different door into the same pool.
The bank’s door
A stokvel is a club with a constitution, a chairperson, a treasurer and a secretary. Members pay in every month, and the money builds until a payout: December groceries, a funeral, school fees, a share of a property.
For a bank, those balances are the cheapest deposits there are. They grow all year and move on a timetable everyone knows in advance.
Until this year, opening a stokvel account at FNB meant getting all 3 signatories into a branch at the same time. In February the bank moved the whole process into its app. Each signatory verifies with a selfie and a Home Affairs ID check from wherever they are, accepts the constitution, and the account opens.
“It took 90 minutes to open a stokvel in a branch, now it takes 10 minutes on this new digital offering.”
Himal Parbhoo, CEO of FNB Cash Investments
The bank changed nothing about the stokvel. The 3 signatories still approve every payment. It changed the door.
90 minutes became 10.
The switch’s door
Kenya’s version is the SACCO, the savings and credit cooperative, and it is not small. The 357 SACCOs regulated by SASRA held Sh1.21 trillion in assets at the end of 2025, up from Sh1.08 trillion a year earlier. Their members had Sh831.91 billion on deposit.
For decades, that money could not move on its own. SACCOs were shut out of Kenya’s national payment system and reached it through sponsor banks. Co-operative Bank built a business on being that sponsor: its Sacco-Link switch connected 619 SACCOs to front-office banking services in 2024, up from 484 the year before, according to Business Daily.
Now the switch itself is letting them in. Pesalink, Kenya’s instant transfer network, has started signing SACCOs directly. Stima Sacco joined last November, giving 220,000 members instant transfers of up to Sh999,999 from its app and USSD menu.
“SACCOs have up until now not been part of the mainstream financial system, and through Pesalink, we are helping bridge that gap.”
Gituku Kirika, CEO of Pesalink
Not every SACCO is ready to walk through it. SASRA’s own count: 267 now offer digital credit products and 250 run a USSD service.
107 have no USSD service at all.
The app’s door
Egypt’s gameya never had a building. Friends or colleagues agree a monthly amount, and each month 1 member takes the whole pot, in turn, until everyone has had theirs.
MoneyFellows, founded in Cairo by Ahmed Wadi in 2016, turned the circle into an app. It matches strangers into circles, collects the payments, and fills the gaps itself.
“If we run circles of 10 people each and only find nine members for some, we step in to fund the missing one.”
Ahmed Wadi, CEO of MoneyFellows
It has to do that for only 7% to 8% of slots, which keeps its balance sheet light. The company says it is profitable in Egypt, counted 8.5 million users at its last raise, and took $13 million in May 2025 in a round led by Morocco’s Al Mada Ventures. Morocco is the next market.
8.5 million people, saving in circles, through 1 app.
The gap
Put the 3 doors side by side and a pattern shows.
The bank kept the group and digitized the paperwork. The switch kept the institution and plugged it into the national rails. The app replaced the group’s social glue with matching software and its own balance sheet.
Each found a way in. None of them built the thing in the middle: the tools a group uses to run itself. The contribution register, the vote on a loan, the payout schedule, the treasurer’s books, the record of who paid and who is late. In most groups that still lives in a notebook or a WhatsApp chat, whichever pipe the money leaves through.
And the pipes themselves are not finished. 107 regulated SACCOs in Kenya cannot be reached by a basic phone menu. Every app in this story signs up 1 person at a time.
The money in this story never moved 1 person at a time. It moves in groups of 10, 20, 50, with a chairperson, a treasurer and a secretary who all have to say yes.
Build for the group, and the customer arrives with members.
