In this episode, Samora Kariuki sits down with Joel Yarbrough, CEO of Moment, for a deep dive into the strategy and technology behind one of Africa's most ambitious new fintech ventures.
The story of a pan-African fintech is often told through big funding rounds and flashy app features. But this narrative skips the most important part: the "unsexy," foundational work required to build a platform that can actually withstand the realities of the market.
This conversation begins with a criticalinsight that explains the entire Moment playbook: the "7th of the Month Problem." Joel Yarbrough details how, for millions of Africans, digital funds run out by the first week of the month, causing debit card and digital payment authorizations to collapse. This single consumer behavior is why a sophisticated cash strategy isn't just a feature—it's the core of the business.It explains their focus on building a vast physical collection network and why meeting customers where they are is the only path to digitizing the continent.
This is a masterclass in building a real enterprise fintech, focusing on reliability over roadmaps and culture over rawtalent. It covers the deliberate choice to build 97% of their own code to handle power cuts and network outages, the practical solutions for the 5-10% of debit orders that fail monthly, and why solving a company's reconciliation headache is often more valuable than the payment itself.
In This Episode, You Will Hear:
● The Strategic Rationale: The thinking inside MultiChoice that led to the creation of Moment as its core fintech play.
● The "Unfair Advantage": How launching with a massive partner allows you to "run water through thepipes" and de-risk a platform at a continental scale.
● The "7th of the Month Problem": A deep dive into a key consumer behavior that explains why a sophisticated cashstrategy is still critical.
● The "Clean Stack" Philosophy: Why building 97% of your own code is a powerful advantage for reliability in theAfrican market.
● A Practical Fix for Failed Debit Orders: Areal-world solution for a common problem that affects recurring revenuebusinesses.
● The Banker's Dilemma: Why traditional banksstruggle to solve the "last mile" cash problem for their corporateclients and how fintech partnerships are the win-win solution.
● Unifying the System: How Moment gives businesses one contract, one settlement, and one clearview of their cash flow across 44 countries.
● A Partnership-Led Approach: How Moment is creating a unified network bycollaborating with the best players instead of trying to do it all alone.
● The Long-Term Vision: How solving payments isthe first step toward leveraging data for a more digitized and inclusive financial ecosystem.
Key Quote: "When you talk to anybody in Africa, trustand reliability and resilience are critical, whether that's network outages, power outages, API outages at the partner level, etc. So we knew what we didn't want to do was put ourselves in a position that we couldn't scale resilience across the market."
