How Platforms are Changing the Landscape of Financial Inclusion

Marissa Dean


We met with Lynk earlier this year to learn more about their platform’s impact on micro-entrepreneurs in Kenya.

In 2018, FiDA Partnership conducted light touch research to unpack platform business models, looking at how they are evolving in terms of financial services. Desk research synthesized information about the business model for more than 40 platform businesses active in Africa, with a few global players included for comparison. For a select number of these, we captured additional details about the platform participants’ economics (e.g. workers, merchants, etc.). Interviews with several key African digital platforms supplemented this information with insights and details around the challenges and obstacles that African digital platforms face, particularly in partnering with financial institutions and FinTechs to directly integrate financial services offerings into their business models. We also interviewed a few other ecosystem players to add perspectives from financial services partners and investors.

Our research findings include:

The learning blog series then goes deeper on platform business models and each module can be read in any order:

Compare platform participants’ economics for workers and merchants across several platforms like Amazon, Jumia and Upwork.

Interested in conducting similar analysis or seeing additional examples? Check this Transactional Platforms Business Model Analysis Guide, which contains a walkthrough of FiDA’s Platformization Lens framework and profiles for the 40 platforms analyzed as well as case studies applying the lens to Upwork and Uber.