Thela Pay is a South African fintech building a mobile peer-to-peer payments wallet — instant send, request, and split transfers by phone number. Our differentiation is a group ledger purpose-built for stokvels and informal savings clubs, which move an estimated tens of billions of rand a year in South Africa with no modern digital tooling. Thela Pay (Pty) Ltd is CIPC-registered (2026/592647/07), with a working product prototype, POPIA and FIC regulatory registrations complete or in progress, and an active banking partnership discussion underway with Bank Zero for embedded account and card issuing. Millions of South Africans save through stokvels, but these groups are almost entirely unbanked at the operational level — contributions are tracked in notebooks or WhatsApp groups, payouts are managed manually by a treasurer, and there is no shared, tamper-proof record of who has paid. This creates disputes and leaves stokvels with no digital financial history. Thela Pay is a mobile wallet that lets anyone send and request money instantly using just a phone number, with a group ledger purpose-built for stokvels and informal savings clubs. Each group gets a shared digital ledger showing every member's contribution history, payment status, and running total — visible to all members, not just the treasurer — surfaced directly inside a built-in group chat via a dedicated Journal view. Unlike general P2P payment apps, which treat transfers as one-to-one events, Thela Pay is built around the group financial structure stokvels actually use: recurring contributions, shared trust, and collective payouts. Giving every member visibility (not just the treasurer) and embedding it in the group's everyday chat is new to the South African market, and creates a digital contribution record that could form the basis of credit history for a population largely invisible to formal credit systems. Our initial target market is stokvel treasurers and members across rotating savings (ROSCA-style) groups, investment stokvels, burial societies, and grocery/purchasing stokvels, plus individuals in these communities who want a simple way to send and receive money peer-to-peer. We have a working React prototype covering wallet balance, send/request, contacts, transaction history, group/direct chat, and the Journal contribution tracker. The production app is in active development on React Native/Expo. Compliance foundations (Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, DPIA, AML/CFT Programme) are drafted, and we are FICA-registered as an accountable institution (Bank Agent category), alongside CIPC, Beneficial Ownership, POPIA Information Officer, and SARS registrations. We have submitted tailored partnership proposals to Bank Zero and Jumo and are awaiting their response. We are raising a pre-seed round to take Thela Pay from prototype to a fully tested, launched app. Funding will go toward completing app development and QA, finalising a banking/payments partnership, and piloting with an initial cohort of stokvels. Key milestones: production-ready app, a signed banking partner, and active usage within pilot stokvel groups