What makes someone trust a lease-to-own mobility model enough to commit financially, particularly in a market like Ghana?
You have to understand the context. In Ghana the lease-to-own model is popularly known as “work and pay.” It has existed for decades: someone provides a vehicle, another person uses it to earn income and pays over an agreed period, and once repayment is complete, they take ownership.
One of the biggest problems has always been a lack of transparency. Drivers had no reliable way to know how much they had paid, how much remained, or whether the terms were being honoured. Some would get close to completing payments only for the owner to cancel the agreement or change the terms. At that point, everything they’d paid could effectively be lost.
So the role of technology was not to make the model more sophisticated. It was to make the relationship more transparent. We built a platform where drivers and riders make payments, see exactly how they’re applied, and track how much they’ve paid and how much remains.
That transparency is what creates trust. It is not something you can simply tell people about. You have to give them evidence of it.
Even after introducing the technology, was there a moment when you had to actively earn people’s trust?
A significant part of the trust came from existing customers referring other drivers and riders. Marketing can generate leads, but there’s a different level of trust when another driver opens the app, shows you their payment history and says, “This is how much I’ve paid. This is how much I have left.”
The challenge was getting the first group to try the product. Those early customers were largely motivated by the immediate need for a vehicle that could help them earn, so they were willing to take the initial risk. Once they made payments and saw how the system worked, they realised it was different from what they’d experienced before.
That created a domino effect. The first customers became proof for the next group. Seeing is believing.
You helped build the Ghana market from the ground up. What has that taught you about distribution and local market behaviour?
There is no universal playbook for entering a market. The business can look deceptively simple from the outside: buy vehicles, find people to use them, deploy them. In reality, many variables determine whether it works. What works in Accra may not work in Kumasi, and what works in Accra may not work in Lagos or Ibadan. Customer behaviour, earning patterns, vehicle preferences and operating conditions vary even within one country.
Early on, we made the mistake of a one-size-fits-all model. When we struggled to penetrate certain markets, we had to stop assuming we knew what would work and go into the market to understand what people were already doing. What is the existing model? What are people accustomed to? What behaviours are we trying to change? A new product can stand out, but it shouldn’t be so far from what people understand that it’s hard to adopt.
Do not become too attached to your idea or your original plan.
We initially applied our understanding of motorcycles to deploying tricycles in certain locations, and it didn’t work as expected. In a startup, failing fast is sometimes a necessity. If a model isn’t working, you can’t spend months convincing yourself it will eventually succeed. Take the loss, learn and realign quickly. The objective is to fail early, before the consequences become too expensive. Those lessons weren’t available to us when we started. We had to learn them by operating.
How do you balance the needs of the driver, the vehicle and the business?
This is why mobility looks much easier from the outside. There are three parties to manage: the vehicle provider, the person taking the vehicle, and the vehicle itself, and you have to find an equilibrium between all three. The provider needs to recover capital and earn a return. The driver needs security and a genuine path to ownership. The vehicle needs to last beyond the repayment period. If a vehicle lasts three months when payments run for a year, everyone loses.
A lot of companies hand over the vehicle and leave maintenance to the person repaying. We take that responsibility ourselves, servicing every two weeks, three weeks or monthly depending on the vehicle, so the burden doesn’t fall on someone already making repayments.
In his example, what market research says the average driver can earn on a given platform.
The repayment that would make no sense against that. Repayments have to be built around actual earning potential.
So we engage the platforms, understand their earning structures, identify the right driver or rider, deploy the vehicle and connect that person to a platform where they can earn. The driver has a way to earn, we have a mechanism for repayment, and the vehicle is maintained so it stays productive during the agreement and beyond.
As Gigmile scales, what has remained constant enough to keep customers trusting the model?
There’s something we say internally: we don’t scale nonsense. We would not have scaled without first finding product-market fit. As we scale, three things are non-negotiable.
A clear and transparent payment structure. Customers need to know where their money is going, how much they’ve paid, how much remains and how long it will take. That has to stay consistent however large we get.
An earning structure that allows customers to afford repayments. That means strong relationships with the platforms they work with and a continuous read on the earning environment.
Assets that remain productive beyond the repayment period. We’ve established a dedicated part of the business for vehicle maintenance, a team whose job is keeping vehicles active, healthy and on the road.
Customers should be able to see exactly where they stand financially, earn enough to meet their commitments, and be confident the asset they’re paying for will remain useful.
Has a customer’s trust ever been genuinely broken? How did you resolve it?
Yes. One customer was consistently making payments, but into the wrong code. We have different options, including USSD and mobile app payments, and he repeatedly used the wrong USSD code, so his money was going somewhere else. He didn’t realise. Eventually he was contacted as a defaulter, and he was shocked. From his perspective he’d been paying consistently, and he believed his money was being taken without being reflected in his account.
The natural reaction would have been to say he’d paid incorrectly and leave it there. Instead, our team went through the process with him.
We went to the payment gateway provider, checked the transaction records and verified what had happened. His mobile money statement confirmed the money had left his account, but gone to a different company because of the wrong code.
We obtained the statements and worked with the gateway provider until the payments were reversed and properly credited to his account.
We didn’t terminate his account just because its status had temporarily become at risk. We knew legitimate payments were pending.
At the point when he believed he’d been cheated, he was angry and felt betrayed. Instead of treating him as someone who had simply failed to pay, we took the time to investigate with him.
That reinforced how important payment transparency is as we scale. We can’t rely on a team member going from office to office every time there’s a payment issue when we have 100,000 vehicles, so it exposed a process that needed to be solved at the system level, and we’re now building ways to resolve these faster.
Operating at the ground level exposes problems you cannot always anticipate on paper. The team has to be agile enough to turn those experiences into better systems.