Challenge

Our client, a mission-driven microfinance organisation operating in Southern Africa, provides small loans to women entrepreneurs to support business growth and financial inclusion. As their portfolio expanded, their existing loan management system began to reveal critical bottlenecks—particularly in customer onboarding, loan approval, and repayment tracking. These inefficiencies limited their ability to scale operations and negatively impacted the user experience for borrowers and field officers alike. They needed a digital solution to streamline these processes and support future growth.

Approach

Robin Labs was brought in to shape and execute a digital strategy tailored to the organisation’s unique operational and social goals. Our engagement combined strategic analysis, behavioural insights, and technical implementation to deliver a solution that addressed both user needs and systemic inefficiencies.

Our process included:

• Operational immersion and behavioural discovery: We facilitated collaborative scoping sessions with stakeholders across the organisation to deeply understand their workflows, strategic goals, and user behaviours—both from internal teams and borrowers in the field.
• Process and system mapping: We mapped end-to-end operational workflows, highlighting inefficiencies in the client approval, loan disbursement, and repayment lifecycle. Particular attention was paid to identifying manual interventions and delays that could be addressed through automation or redesign.
• Technology landscape evaluation: We conducted a build-vs-buy analysis to assess whether the organisation’s needs could be met with existing SaaS tools or whether a custom solution was warranted. Given the unique constraints of their environment—including offline field operations and localisation needs—we opted to build a bespoke application layer.
• Solution architecture and development: We designed a modular, user-facing application that integrated with the existing loan management infrastructure. The new layer automated several key functions, provided a significantly improved user experience, and introduced intelligent workflows to guide decision-making. The system was built using agile methodology, with regular testing cycles to ensure the solution remained aligned with user needs.
• Implementation and support: We supported operational rollout through training, field testing, and ongoing iteration based on user feedback and live performance data.

Results

The solution delivered measurable impact across the operation:

• Key loan processes were fully automated, including onboarding, application submission, eligibility checks, disbursement, and repayment scheduling—dramatically reducing the need for manual intervention.
• Client approval time dropped from 24 hours to under 1 minute, enabling same-day access to capital.
• Overall loan processing time was reduced by 40%, freeing up operational capacity and enabling the organisation to serve more clients with the same resources.
• Field teams reported improved usability and reduced administrative overhead, while leadership gained better visibility into portfolio performance through real-time dashboards.

The result was a scalable, user-centred platform that aligned with the organisation’s social impact mission and operational realities—empowering them to grow sustainably and reach more women entrepreneurs across the region.

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