Quick Read · 01
Twenty-Five Shillings
A household in Kenya pays twenty-five shillings a day for a solar system, through mobile money. In July 2025 those payments were bundled into a KES 20.1 billion securitisation, the largest ever completed in Sub-Saharan Africa outside South Africa, funded by five commercial banks with three development finance institutions taking the junior risk.
Nineteen cents a day at one end. A rated, tranched instrument at the other.
Nothing in between was invented. The households were always paying. What changed is that each payment was recorded at that size, against that customer, on that date, and could therefore be counted.
Resolution sets the ceiling
The smallest unit a system records determines the largest thing that can be built on it.
Record annually and the instruments available are annual. Record daily, tied to a device and a person, and the options open up: a payment plan, a repayment history, a credit assessment, a pooled receivable, a tranche, a rating, an asset a pension fund can hold.
Fine records can always be aggregated into coarse ones. Coarse records cannot be disaggregated into fine ones. That asymmetry decides what an economy can finance.
A payment is a fact.