Country: Kenya
Segments: Agricultural microfinance, rural lending
Background
Juhudi Kilimo is a leading microfinance institution in Kenya focused on financing smallholder farmers and rural entrepreneurs. Before adopting MFI Expert, Juhudi Kilimo was running its core operations on a Salesforce-based core banking setup. While flexible, the previous system had limited functionality for microfinance and had become costly to operate and extend.
Challenges
- High licensing and customization costs on the Salesforce-based core banking platform.
- Limited microfinance-specific features, requiring workarounds for loan products and group lending.
- Fragmented tools for CRM, field operations, and mobile money, making it hard to get a single view of the customer.
- Manual processes and spreadsheets in some areas, slowing down decision-making and reporting.
Solution
MFI Expert replaced the legacy Salesforce-based core banking system with a unified microfinance platform. The implementation covered the full digitalization of Juhudi Kilimo’s operations:
- CRM: Centralized customer and group information, lifecycle tracking, and activity history.
- Core banking: Loan and savings products designed for Juhudi Kilimo’s business model, including group lending and agricultural cycles.
- Digital Field Application (DFA): Mobile app for field officers to originate loans, capture KYC, and record collections in the field.
- Mobile Money integration: Integration with mobile money (such as M-Pesa) for collections and repayments.
- Business analytics: Dashboards and reports to monitor portfolio quality, productivity, and profitability.
Key impact metrics
Results
By moving to MFI Expert, Juhudi Kilimo achieved both cost savings and total digital transformation of its operations. The institution now runs its day-to-day activities on a platform designed for microfinance, with integrated CRM, core banking, DFA, mobile money, and analytics.
- Reduced total cost of ownership compared to the Salesforce-based core banking setup.
- Improved efficiency for field officers and branch staff through DFA and process automation.
- Better data for management through consolidated reporting and analytics.
- Stronger foundation for growth and innovation across Kenya and rural markets.
Juhudi Kilimo’s experience shows how a platform built specifically for microfinance can replace generic, expensive systems and deliver a more complete digital transformation.