The PayGo Lab founding team has made the strategic decision to shut down the PAYGo Lab. They will be starting a new chapter as the Micro Asset Finance (MAF) Lab.
Why the change?
The team has learned that “pay-as-you-go” is best placed to scale sustainably if two specialised entities work together:
- Last-mile distributors (LMDs) focused on sales, installation, and service.
- Micro asset financing entities, specialised in responsibly underwriting and managing small loans or credit facilities (e.g. US$100-US$2,000) to enable individuals or small businesses purchase productive assets.
Why now?
Since 2023, the PayGo Lab has supported 42 country operations to embrace PAYGo 2.0, and has built a data infrastructure that has forensically analysed raw data from over 4 million PAYGo contracts.
While PAYGo 2.0 practices improved performance in the short term, gains often faded. The root causes are structural:
- Incentives (including via large scale subsidy programs) reward volume over quality of sales. Success is still measured via the sale of a physical product, with a lack of emphasis on the willingness and ability of customers to pay.
- Governance remains opaque, as the industry continues to operate in a grey zone with respect to its lending practices; adoption and uptake of rigorous standardized metrics has been slow.
The team's new focus as the Micro Asset Finance Lab:
they are going to build “micro asset finance” as a bankable, sustainable asset class, and focus in three main areas:
- Benchmarking: Transparent, rigorous analytics that demystify customer repayment rates and restore funder confidence.
- Building micro asset finance entities: testing and scaling products, pricing, risk frameworks, and data pipelines that are bankable and sustainable.
- Unbundling: Helping incumbents separate credit from sales — diagnostics, institutional arrangements, capacity development, and change management.
Though their name is changing, the mission remains the same: to make essential products accessible and build a bankable, sustainable asset finance ecosystem — for customers, companies, and investors alike.