Terms of service

1. Who these terms bind

These terms are between you and PesaRails Africa Ltd ("PesaRails", "we", "us"), a company incorporated in Kenya and based in Nairobi. They apply to this website and to the PesaRails platform. Three groups read them, and they do not all mean the same thing:

Visitors to this website

Sections 2, 5, 9 and 12 through 16 apply to you. Browsing the site or submitting the demo form means you accept them.

Financial institutions that license the platform

All of these terms apply, but your signed agreement comes first. See section 4.

Borrowers and members

Your loan contract is with your lender, not with us. See section 3. Almost nothing here changes your rights against them.

2. What PesaRails is, and what it is not

We build credit infrastructure: a credit scoring engine, a WhatsApp loan origination chatbot, a borrower self-service portal, and a core management information system. Licensed and registered financial institutions use these products to run their own lending.

We are a technology vendor. We are not a lender. We are not licensed or regulated by the Central Bank of Kenya, we do not lend on our own account, we do not hold client funds, and we do not decide who receives credit or on what terms. Every lending decision made through the platform is made by the financial institution that configured it.

3. If you are a borrower

Your agreement is with the institution that lent to you. They set the interest, the fees, the repayment schedule and the consequences of default. They decide whether to approve you. We supply the software they use to do it.

That has some practical consequences worth stating plainly:

• Questions about your balance, your repayment schedule, a decline, or a charge go to your lender. We cannot change any of them.
• A credit score produced by the platform is one input to your lender's decision, not the decision itself. If you were declined, you are entitled to the reasons, and the platform generates an adverse action notice with specific reason codes for that purpose. Ask your lender for it.
• If you want a decision reviewed by a person rather than left to an automated process, you have that right under section 35 of the Kenya Data Protection Act 2019. Raise it with your lender and we will support them in answering.
• For access to or deletion of your personal data, start with your lender, then see our data deletion instructions if you cannot reach them.

4. If you are a financial institution

Your use of the platform is governed by the signed agreement and order form between us, which covers scope, fees, service levels, data processing and term. Where these terms and that agreement conflict, the signed agreement prevails. These terms fill gaps; they do not override negotiated ones.

As a condition of using the platform you undertake to:

• Hold and maintain the licences and registrations your lending activity requires
• Act as data controller for your borrowers, obtain the consents the law requires, and give them the notices it requires
• Configure scoring thresholds, fees and approval rules lawfully, and take responsibility for the decisions those settings produce
• Not onboard anyone under 18
• Keep credentials secure, provision staff accounts individually, and tell us promptly if an account is compromised
• Meet your own anti-money-laundering, record-keeping and reporting obligations

5. Acceptable use

You may not:

• Use the platform for anything unlawful, or to lend without the required authorisation
• Attempt to access another institution's data, or probe the isolation between tenants
• Reverse engineer, decompile, scrape or copy the platform, or benchmark it for a competing product, except where the law says you may
• Interfere with the service, its security controls, or its availability to others
• Upload malware, or knowingly upload forged or stolen identity documents
• Resell or sublicense access without our written agreement

We may suspend access without notice where we reasonably believe this section has been breached and the risk is immediate. Otherwise we will raise it with you first.

6. Accounts and security

Accounts are individual. Sharing credentials defeats the audit trail and is a breach of these terms. Administrator accounts require multi-factor authentication. You are responsible for activity under your credentials until you tell us they are compromised.

7. The WhatsApp channel

Where a lender enables the chatbot, conversations run on the WhatsApp Business Platform and are also subject to Meta's terms. Message delivery depends on Meta and on your mobile network, and neither is under our control. Standard network data charges may apply to you.

8. Availability and changes

We aim for high availability and publish service levels in client agreements, but the service is not guaranteed to be uninterrupted or error free. Planned maintenance is notified in advance where practicable. We may add, change or withdraw features; where a change materially reduces functionality a client relies on, we will give reasonable notice.

Parts of the platform depend on third parties, including Meta for WhatsApp delivery, Safaricom for M-PESA, and SMS providers. An outage at one of them can interrupt the service through no fault of ours.

9. Intellectual property

The platform, the software, the models, the documentation and the PesaRails name and marks are ours and stay ours. Licensing the platform grants a right to use it for the term of the agreement, and nothing more.

Your data stays yours. Borrower records, documents and transaction history belong to the institution that collected them. We claim no ownership of it and we do not use one client's data to serve another. Where we improve the platform using aggregate operational statistics, those are stripped of anything identifying a person or an institution.

10. Data protection

How we handle personal data, the split between our role as controller and as processor, who we share data with and what rights you have are set out in our privacy policy, which forms part of these terms. Deletion requests are covered at data deletion.

11. Fees

Fees, billing frequency and payment terms are in your order form. Nothing on the marketing pages of this website is an offer capable of acceptance, and indicative pricing shown there is not a quotation.

12. Disclaimers

Credit scores, fraud signals and anti-money-laundering alerts produced by the platform are decision support. They are not financial advice, not a guarantee of repayment, and not a statement that any particular applicant is creditworthy or fraudulent. They are statistical outputs derived from the data available, and that data can be incomplete or wrong. The lender remains responsible for its own credit and compliance judgement.

Beyond what these terms and your signed agreement state, and to the extent Kenyan law allows, the platform is provided as is without further warranty.

13. Limitation of liability

Nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited, including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud.

Subject to that, and to anything different agreed in a signed agreement, we are not liable for lost profits, lost business, loss of goodwill, or indirect or consequential loss. Our total liability arising out of the service in any twelve month period is limited to the fees paid by that client for the service in that period. Website visitors who are not clients pay nothing and, on that basis, we accept no monetary liability to them for use of this site.

We are not liable for credit losses arising from a lending decision you chose to make.

14. Term and termination

Client agreements run for the term in the order form. Either party may terminate for material breach that is not remedied within 30 days of written notice. On termination we make your data available for export for 30 days, then delete it, except where law requires us or your institution to retain it. See section 9 of the privacy policy for why some records outlive a request to erase them.

15. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of Kenya. The courts of Kenya have exclusive jurisdiction, save that either party may seek urgent injunctive relief wherever it is needed. We will try to resolve any dispute by discussion first.

16. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms and will revise the effective date above. For clients, material changes are notified under the signed agreement and do not take effect mid term without the notice that agreement requires. Continued use of the website after a change means you accept the revised terms.

17. Contact

Email

info@pesarails.com

Registered address

PesaRails Africa Ltd
TRV Plaza, Muthithi Road
Nairobi 00100, Kenya