The rails Kenyan lenders run on

Why we exist

Most lending software sold into this market was designed elsewhere and adapted afterwards. Provisioning ladders assume a ninety-day non-performing threshold, and a SACCO sits at thirty. Borrower onboarding assumes a branch visit, and most first contact now arrives over WhatsApp. Reporting assumes a regulator that does not exist here.

PesaRails starts from the Kenyan constraints instead. Apache Fineract provides the core banking ledger, because the ledger is not ours to reinvent. Around it sit the parts this market actually needs: credit scoring that can be explained to a borrower and to an auditor, a WhatsApp origination channel, AML surveillance, and reporting shaped to CBK prudential guidelines. Each institution runs in its own database schema with its own Fineract instance.

We are not a lender. We never hold borrower capital, and the lending licence stays with the institution.

Mission and vision

Mission

Give every licensed Kenyan lender the core banking, credit and compliance infrastructure that until now only the largest could afford to run.

Vision

Credit decisions in Kenya made on evidence, explained to the borrower, and auditable by the regulator.

What we hold ourselves to

Evidence over assertion

Every claim we make to a customer cites an artifact: a test, a runbook, a document. If we cannot cite it, we say it is in progress.

The institution's data is the institution's

A separate schema, a separate core banking database, and an export path that does not depend on our goodwill.

Controls that actually bind

Approval and disbursement are held by different roles, because a control that one person can bypass is not a control. A loan officer cannot approve their own application, and the finance manager who releases the money cannot approve it.

Boring, observable operations

Correlation IDs end to end, an audit trail of every request, and runbooks for the incidents we have actually had.

What we build

Four products, licensed separately and enabled per institution. They write to the same ledger, so a loan originated over WhatsApp is the same loan the finance team disburses and the auditor later inspects.

Core MIS

Apache Fineract-backed core banking: clients, loans, savings, shares, fixed deposits, the general ledger and the full accounting chain.

Credit scoring

Scores built from transaction statements, with component breakdowns, explanations, and the adverse-action reason a borrower can be told. The Central Bank of Kenya requires a declined borrower to be given a reason, and that requirement shaped the product: a score nobody can explain is one no lender can defend.

WhatsApp lending

Origination in the channel borrowers already use: apply, submit KYC, check status, and hand off to a human agent when needed. English and Swahili.

Borrower portal

A mobile-first portal for customers to see balances, schedules and statements without calling the branch.

Who we serve

Microfinance banks, SACCOs, digital credit providers and non-deposit-taking credit providers. These lenders come to us precisely because they lack the in-house capacity to integrate a core banking system, a credit bureau and mobile money on their own.

We are early, and we would rather show depth than borrow scale. There is no client count or transaction volume on this page. We have live institutions on the platform and are happy to discuss them under NDA with their consent, because a number we cannot evidence is worth less than the trust it costs.

Registry record

Registered name

Pesa Rails Limited

Company number

PVT-8Z1K9VD2

Type

Private limited company, incorporated under the Companies Act, 2015

Date of registration

13 March 2026

Registered office

TRV Plaza, Muthithi Road
Westlands, Nairobi 00100
Kenya

PesaRails and PesaRails Africa are trading names of Pesa Rails Limited.

Contact

General and sales

info@pesarails.com

Location

Westlands, Nairobi, Kenya