Business Financing: Designing for Cash Flow Reality
Examined how small businesses experience cash flow gaps caused by delayed customer payments, and how they reason about unpaid invoices, loan terms, and financing choices in practice.
The research reshaped how the team understood invoice financing, revealing where the product conflicted with real cash flow behavior and decision timing. This reframing guided changes to product positioning and application flow, contributing to a successful launch generating $4M+ in annual revenue and a 17% reduction in customer churn.
Macroeconomy: Economic Pressure and Repayment Behavior
Explored how inflation, income volatility, and broader economic pressure shaped loan repayment behavior in Kenya, including how borrowers prioritized lenders under constrained financial conditions.
The work shifted internal understanding of repayment behavior during economic stress, helping the team rethink which repayment patterns mattered most and how repayment mechanisms should be prioritized. These changes informed adjustments to Tala’s repayment approach and contributed to an approximate 6% increase in repayment rates.
Banking-as-a-Service: Product Direction for SMBs
Focused on understanding how small and mid-sized businesses perceived embedded banking products, where trust and adoption broke down, and how existing positioning failed to reflect real financial behavior.
The study clarified which SMB segments and use cases were worth pursuing and which were not, prompting a shift away from replacement banking assumptions toward complementary, low-friction use cases. This reframing shaped product scope, use-case definition, and messaging, helping the team more clearly define the platform’s role within SMB financial workflows.
