Reimagining money movement for African SMEs
Small and medium businesses across East Africa lose up to 11% of cross-border transaction value to intermediary banks, forex spreads, and compliance friction. Existing fintech tools are built for enterprise or for consumers, no product treats the SME tier as a first-class citizen, and local compliance (BNR, KRA, BOT) is poorly supported.
We designed and built FinWave from zero to production in six months. A unified dashboard lets operators invoice in local currency, receive in USD/EUR, auto-reconcile with their accounting, and generate compliance-ready exports. The backend runs on tRPC + PostgreSQL with a Stripe Connect integration for payout rails and a custom FX engine for interbank settlement. On the front end, a design system built in Figma maps 1:1 to shared React primitives.
Stakeholder interviews, regulatory mapping, and competitive audit across 6 East African markets.
System design, database schema, API contracts, and infrastructure provisioning.
Invoicing engine, FX module, Stripe Connect integration, and reconciliation dashboard.
Load testing, BNR compliance review, penetration testing, and user acceptance.
Staged rollout to 50 pilot businesses, monitoring, and rapid iteration on feedback.
Multi-currency invoices with auto-computed FX, tax, and compliance fields per jurisdiction.
Payouts to local mobile money or bank accounts in under 90 seconds on major corridors.
One-click regulatory exports for BNR, KRA, and BOT with audit trails and filing history.
Native two-way sync with QuickBooks, Xero, and Zoho Books; reconciliation in minutes, not days.
Granular role-based access with approval workflows for payments above configurable thresholds.
On-device risk scoring and device fingerprinting block ~93% of suspicious activity before submit.
App Router, server components, and streaming for instant-feel dashboards.
End-to-end type safety from database rows to React props.
Source of truth for ledgers, with row-level security for tenant isolation.
Type-safe API layer; no schemas, no codegen, no drift.
Payout rails and KYC for marketplace-style disbursements.
Design-system-first styling that stays fast and on-brand.
Single source of truth for tokens, components, and flows.
FinWave replaced three tools, cut our month-end close from two weeks to two days, and gave us compliance confidence we didn't know was possible at this price point.
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