Credit infrastructure for the businesses banks cannot assess.

The problem behaves like a measurement failure

Africa’s SME financing constraint is usually described as a capital shortage. A profitable supplier that has delivered the goods and is waiting to be paid is not short of a business; it is short of a way to prove one. A distributor with a reliable anchor and no audited accounts is in the same position from the other side. Banks have capital. What they lack is a signal they can underwrite, and that is a different investment from funding a balance sheet.

The anchor-led motion

Mtaji does not acquire SMEs one at a time. It integrates with an anchor (a corporate that buys from some businesses and sells to others) and that one integration reaches both sides of its supply chain at once: the suppliers it pays and the distributors it supplies. The anchor is the distribution channel and the credit signal in the same step, because the trading record the anchor already holds is the record a bank could never assemble on its own.

This is why the products come in two families and why the business is built to serve both. Supply-side products bridge the wait for payment on goods already delivered. Buy-side facilities finance the stock a distributor needs to buy. The obligor differs by product, and the platform states it per product rather than per side.

Network effects, on both sides

Each anchor brings its suppliers and its distributors, and each of those businesses trades with other anchors, so the network densifies from the inside. Each financier that joins adds capacity the existing anchors can draw on. Each program that runs adds trading history the next assessment can draw on. The effects compound in the direction a marketplace needs them to (more anchors make the platform worth more to financiers, and more financiers make it worth more to anchors) and the same business appears on the supply side of one relationship and the buy side of another.

The M-Score as the moat

The M-Score assesses a business on three pillars: transaction quality, relationship strength and business fundamentals. The first two are built from what a supply chain already records (what is traded, how consistently, how deep and durable the anchor relationship is) which is exactly the data a thin-file business has and a bureau does not. That data accrues to the platform with every program that runs, and it is not available to a competitor who has not integrated with the anchor.

We do not publish weightings, threshold numbers, point allocations or algorithm detail on any public surface, and we do not put model performance figures on a marketing page. Where performance is implied, it is modeled rather than observed, and the diligence materials say which.

Two commercial models, both real

A bank can run its own branded supply chain finance operation on the platform, with its own anchors, customers and credit decisions, and that model is live in production today. Or a bank can join a shared marketplace of anchor programs that Mtaji originates, at whichever depth of integration suits it, from a full core banking connection down to a portal on a smartphone for a SACCO and participation-only for a development finance institution. No financier on the marketplace cherry-picks: any anchor a financier brings stays exclusive to it, and anchors Mtaji originates are allocated between financiers by the rules in the program documentation. The pipeline, by institution and stage, is in the data room. The two models are different businesses with different economics, and those economics are part of the data room rather than this page.