News

By: Olivia Zank, CEO Recently I was reading an article by the excellent Jeff Schnurr from Jaza Energy about how we shouldn’t listen to what your clients are saying, but instead hear what they are telling us. Jaza, a rural electrification startup, found real product-market fit when they paid attention to what the market revealed to them, rather than what its participants were saying. That got me thinking about what...

The tech team work is just getting started I joined BeneFactors in April this Year as CTO. My most urgent mandate was to build a new back-office system on top of which we will then start deploying our innovations to unlock fast working capital financing to SMEs. Four months down the road, our teams have now fully adopted a newly built back-office System, Rosling 2.0 I wanted to share our...

With the world now in the throes of a historic recession, two things are clear: Firstly, we will need billions of dollars to revive global supply chains and safeguard jobs. Secondly, as mentioned last week by the Rwanda’s minister of finance Ndagijimana in a UNECA session on economic recovery, these billions must be set up intentionally so to reach SMEs. SMEs are typically caught between a rock and hard place...

At Benefactors, we provide factoring services that consist of advancing funds to businesses (mostly SMEs) based on their Accounts Receivables. In non-technical terms, we give money to SMEs that need immediate cash, against invoices that they issued to their clients who generally apply 45 to 90 days payment terms. Factoring products have proven to be great contributors to improving access to finance for SMEs in general and particularly in Africa...

Our lives have all changes radically in the last few days. Mornings in Kigali are very different than just a week ago - no rush hour traffic, no school children marching towards their classrooms, no cleaners sweeping the streets. For most businesspeople, it's a stressful time, wondering how long can we survive like this? For everyone though, the anxiety about the virus and Rwanda’s healthcare system's ability to treat everyone...

Benefactors CEO and Founder Olivia Zank has now been featured twice on CNBC Africa! She discusses how factoring can ease access to finance for SMEs. Factoring helps businesses to continue to grow in a market where cash flow problems are common. By providing an advance on overdue invoices, factoring enables SMEs to access funds when they are needed, so business can carry on. You can see the full two interviews...