On 29 June, we opened Lance in Public Beta.
Like most product launches, this marks the point where something we've spent many months building becomes available to people beyond our own team. It is a milestone we are proud of, but it also feels like an appropriate moment to explain what has been occupying our thinking over the past several months.
When we first started working on Lance, we assumed we would spend most of our time thinking about disrupting lending. Instead, we found ourselves thinking about the reasons people borrow and not just how people borrow and why the core issues still remain regardless of more technology options and fintech growth.
That may sound like a small distinction, but it has shaped almost every decision we've made.
Credit is often discussed as though it is a single product. In reality, it sits behind thousands of different decisions people make every day. Paying for a professional course is different from financing inventory. Covering an unexpected expense is different from investing in equipment for a growing business. The amount borrowed may be similar, but the circumstances, expectations, and outcomes are not.
The more time we've spent on this problem, the more we've come to appreciate that context matters. Context for the why and context for the who.
Not simply because it helps lenders make better decisions, but because it changes how credit itself should be designed.
If the reason someone is borrowing matters, then perhaps the product should reflect that. Perhaps repayment should reflect that. Perhaps the experience should reflect that. Perhaps credit should feel less like a generic financial product and more like something designed around a specific moment in someone's life. And who that someone is should also be taken into context.
This line of thinking led us to how we thought about the first few solutions at Lance.
We are still building lending infrastructure. That remains the foundation of what we do. But we have also been building products on top of that infrastructure that are more closely aligned with how credit is actually used.
In practice, that has meant thinking less about credit as a single product, and more as a set of journeys that sit on top of reliable infrastructure.
Some of those journeys are shaped by how people prefer to interact with credit in our markets. Community-based structures. Peer-to-known-peer trust. Repayment flows that reflect irregular income patterns. Communication that is consistent, clear, and adapted to how people actually manage money day to day.
Alongside that, there is the underlying infrastructure that makes any of this possible. Systems that help us lend and understand risk more clearly. Open banking connections that give additional views of financial behaviour. Repayment flows that are reliable, predictable and observable. Wallet infrastructure that reflects real financial movement but baked with flexibility for growth. Regulatory and compliance systems that allow these flows to exist in a structured and safe way that also builds trust between all parties.
Taken together, Lance is lending infrastructure that provides and powers a set of tailored credit products built on top of that infrastructure, designed for different contexts and use cases for Africans.
Education as an Early Use Case
For example, one of our early use cases is Education.
Over the past year, we spoke with training providers, employers, and professionals across different industries. Again and again, we encountered people who had already decided to invest in themselves. They had found the programme they wanted, understood its value, and were ready to begin. The obstacle was rarely the decision itself. More often, it was the timing of the payment.
It became increasingly clear that financing education was not simply about making credit available. It was about making opportunities available when it mattered.
This means credit is not just a question of whether someone can repay. It is also a question of what they are trying to do, and whether the structure and flow of the solution reflects that intention, can correctly underwrite that opportunity and support that opportunity end to end.
If the reason someone is borrowing matters and the context of who is borrowing matters, then the design of credit should reflect that. Not only in underwriting better, but in repayment, communication, product flow, and the systems that support it.
That thinking shaped our first partnership with Treford, making course financing available to eligible learners through Lance. It also shaped something broader about how we think the company should evolve.
Building with Context
We've become increasingly convinced that some of the most useful credit products will not begin with lending. They will begin with understanding the environment in which lending happens.
Communities, institutions, and businesses often understand the people they serve in ways a standalone financial product cannot. They understand what success looks like, what progress looks like, and why someone is seeking financing in the first place. We think that context is valuable and we think that as Africans we also understand why contextualising better for Africans is also valuable, and we think technology should make better use of it.
Public Beta is our first opportunity to test these ideas in the real world.
As with any early product, there will be things we improve, assumptions we revisit, and decisions we change as we learn from customers and partners. We expect Lance to evolve considerably over the coming months, and we hope that evolution is visible. Building financial products requires conviction, but it also requires a willingness to discover where your assumptions were incomplete while making changes and growth happen quickly.
For now, our focus is simple. Build carefully. Listen closely. Learn quickly.
We're grateful to everyone who has helped us reach this point, especially our early customers, partners, and the people who challenged our thinking long before there was a product to use.
We look forward to continuing to build and learn alongside our customers and partners.