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Process a Kenyan merchant's payments, watch their real cash flow, then lend them unsecured working capital and take repayment as a percentage of the money already flowing through you
largest single unrecovered loan KSh 10M, absorbed inside that month's book · merchants span a national restaurant chain on full API down to kiosks running USSD on a Nokia
"A lot of my staff are amateur psychologists — they don't realise it." His point is that data alone does not make a lending book work: you also have to know where your loan sits in the borrower's personal hierarchy of obligations.
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Chad Larson is American — raised in the Minnesota suburbs, ten years in bonds at Bank of America in San Francisco, an MBA in the UK, then Kenya. He is blunt about what he actually does: "the thing I do best is run lending businesses." Before Kopo Kopo he was a cofounder and CFO of a pay-as-you-go solar company in Kenya, which is a separate and much less happy story. He has been CEO of Kopo Kopo for almost five years. What matters about that timing is that he did not build the company. When he arrived, Kopo Kopo had already existed for a long time, the technology was mature and useful, and a lot of Kenyan businesses were using it loyally. In his words he inherited the great bones of a business. What he changed over four or five years was, first, the discipline — being much more deliberate about where money gets spent and what return it produces — and second, and this is the part he calls his signature on the company, adding a lending business on top of the payments product. That is the whole thesis of this entry: the payments processor was a mature, presumably low-margin utility; the lending book layered on top of it is where the economics changed. Our read: this is the clearest real-world example we have of the "payments first, credit second" sequencing that gets talked about constantly and executed rarely, told by the person who executed it.
The lending book never had to find customers. Chad Larson became CEO of a company that had been around a long time, with mature technology and, in his words, lots of businesses in Kenya using it loyally, and he added credit on top of that base.
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Data credibility: First-person operator interview on a Kenyan personal-finance podcast. Chad Larson is the CEO of Kopo Kopo, not its founder — he says the company existed for a long time before he joined roughly five years ago and that he inherited mature technology and a loyal merchant base — so read the operational claims as those of the person currently running it. Every figure is self-reported in conversation, with no dashboard, filing, regulator data or third-party source shown or cited. Operator-stated and unaudited: about KSh 600 million lent per month, a largest single unrecovered loan of KSh 10 million, an ongoing insolvency petition against that borrower, and the customer spread from Java on full API integration down to kiosks on USSD. Figures are kept in Kenyan shillings deliberately: the interview gives no USD conversion for either number and we do not invent exchange rates. Note carefully what is absent — no revenue, no interest rate, no default or delinquency rate, no portfolio yield, no funding source, no merchant count and no headcount appear anywhere. KSh 600M a month is loan disbursement volume, which is not income and should never be presented as such. ⚠️ Auto-caption garbling: the company is rendered variously as "copper copper", "Copo Copo", "cop Copo" and "Cobo Cobo", which we read as Kopo Kopo; the mobile-money system is rendered "impesa", read as M-Pesa; the restaurant chain "the Javas" is read as Java. Verify all three before publication. The interview also predates 2026 in tone and content, so treat it as a historical snapshot rather than a current statement of the business.
The first money in this line of business is interest on a small unsecured advance to a merchant the lender already watches.
Two loops turn at once here.
A credit book is slow to answer. Money goes out immediately and the truth about whether the underwriting was right arrives only when a cohort has matured, which means the early months of any lending product are spent without the one number that matters.
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