International lenders battle to keep up with Kenyan rivals as mobile borrowing turns into a craze

Tala, which rebranded from Mkopo Rahisi, is owned by California-based InVenture, while Branch is a Facebook-linked mobile application that allows users to borrow and repay micro-loans through Safaricom’s mobile money platform M-Pesa.PHOTO: COURTESY

Six broke university students were sitting in a room at Maseno University back in 2013, discussing how best to spend their Friday night.

Without money, however, their options were looking pretty limited and very dull. As they glanced down at their phones in the hopes of finding a miracle, one of the students came across a text message he had received from M-Shwari, a mobile loans product that had launched a year earlier.