MiKashBoks is proud to announce finishing in second place at the 2022 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Sloan Fintech Conference’s “Global Start-up Pitch Competition.”

Chief Technology Officer Salton Massally and Chief Product Officer Rachel Chang gave a two-minute pitch on digitizing informal financial transactions. Their presentation focused on the Mabula Woman’s Group in Bombali, Sierra Leone, a community of 50 women in rural Sierra Leone who have saved and lent together for a generation. Tens of thousands of transactions, but their financial lives are invisible outside of their group.

They are part of the 400M that save together informally, also called Tandas in Latin America and Chit Funds in Asia. They save small amounts weekly, into a cash box, borrow from that pool, and earn interest when others borrow. Yet, their impact has been limited by paper ledgers. It’s hard to manage and they can’t build a financial profile with siloed data.

MiKashBoks ends that invisibility and is a digital social finance platform that makes saving and lending in groups easier and safer.

In addition to winning second place from the judging panel, MiKashBoks was awarded the audience choice prize, important validation from a room of financial technology experts.

The feedback, connections, and validation represent an important milestone for MikashBoks as we ramp up our global deployment efforts as we move towards our first 100k users.

Our mission is to transform the financial experiences of the last billion, being the platform that people trust to achieve their financial goals together.