Savings circles, kept honest.
Rotaro is a consumer app for rotating savings and credit circles, known as ajo and esusu in Nigeria, susu in Ghana and the Caribbean, pardner in the United Kingdom, chama in East Africa and tanda in Latin America. An organiser starts a group, members join, everyone pays in on schedule, and each round one member receives the pot.
- Product
- Rotaro
- Category
- Fintech
- Status
- In production
- For
- Organisers and members of thrift and savings groups
- Where
- United Kingdom & Nigeria
- Site
- getrotaro.co.uk
- Built with
- .NET · Expo for iOS, Android and web · Next.js · PostgreSQL · Authly
What Rotaro does.
Rotaro gives the group a single, shared, tamper-evident record of who paid, who confirmed and who was paid, so nobody has to rely on a spreadsheet or a WhatsApp thread.
Rotaro never holds money. Members pay each other directly, or through accounts that a licensed partner holds in their name. The app records, reminds, reconciles and escalates; it does not keep funds.
Groups in minutes
Currency, contribution amount, frequency, number of rounds, start date, a payout order set by hand, by a checkable seeded draw or by members choosing slots, and a deputy organiser.
One shared record
Every contribution, confirmation, dispute, correction and rule outcome is an append-only entry carrying a hash of the one before it, so any change would show.
Confirmation with escalation
A payer marks a payment, the recipient confirms or reports it missing, and an unanswered item escalates to the organiser. Nobody confirms or decides their own payment.
Rules for missed payments
The group's missed-payment, guarantor and member-leaving rules apply the same way to everyone.
Payment ways per contribution
Pay the recipient directly, by UK Direct Debit into the organiser's provider account, or in Nigeria by a transfer to a member's virtual account that counts automatically.
Plans set by the operator
A free plan with limits and paid plans with trials and seats. Every price, limit and trial length is data set per country, none of it fixed in code.
Trust and safety
Identity checks, one person one account, device records for audit and an operations review queue.
Two themes
The Ink (dark) and Paper (light) themes, switchable by the member, with readable text in both.
Built for the people who run it.
- Organisers of thrift and savings groups
- Members who want proof of what they paid and what they are owed
- Diaspora groups saving across the United Kingdom and Nigeria
The rules it keeps.
- The group is the access boundary. Another group's records answer as if they did not exist.
- Licensed partners sit behind ports. Which provider serves each job in each country is data an operator sets, with a second person's approval to switch one on.
- Instructions to partners go through an outbox and are reconciled afterwards, so a crash never loses or duplicates one.
- Each country is its own deployment with its own database, so members' data stays in its region.
The same six rules apply to everything we build. How we build