2,938 Licences, 19 Apps: Checking a Digital Lender in Tanzania

An app offers money in ten minutes, with no collateral, no branch and no paperwork. The screen says the lender is licensed by the Bank of Tanzania. That sentence can be perfectly true while the product on offer holds no approval at all.

This page is the digital lender verification file: which two approvals a lawful loan app carries, which registers publish them, what a lender may not do while collecting, and where a complaint goes once something has already gone wrong. Every step is one a borrower can take alone, from a phone, before installing anything.

How many loan apps are actually licensed in Tanzania?

Digital lenders sit in Tier 2 of the Microfinance Act 2018 — non-deposit-taking microfinance service providers. A Tier 2 provider may lend. It may not take deposits, and it is not a bank.

Those two numbers are not in conflict, and understanding why is the subject of this page. A microfinance licence lets a company lend. It does not let that company lend through an app. Lending through an app needs a second approval, granted product by product, and most licensed lenders have never asked for one.

The wrong conclusion is easy to draw from the table. It does not mean 2,919 companies are operating unlawfully. Most of those licensees lend in ways that have nothing to do with an app — through offices, agents, groups and employers. The point is narrower. The population of lawful digital lending products in Tanzania is small, and it is published. A platform absent from that short register holds no approval, whatever its owner holds otherwise.

What are the two things a digital lender must hold?

The Bank set this out in its Guidance Note on Digital Lenders under Tier 2 Microfinance Service Providers, issued on 27 August 2024. A lender must hold both. Either alone is not enough.

The second is the one borrowers have never heard of, and it does the work. It is granted per product, so a licensed lender launching a new app — or a new loan type inside an existing app — needs a fresh letter. This is why a banner claiming the lender is licensed by the Bank of Tanzania answers a different question from the one a borrower is asking. The answer is a licence and a product approval, and both are checkable.

Which digital lending platforms are on the Bank of Tanzania register?

The Bank publishes a Register of List of Approved Digital Lending Platforms, linked from its List of Licensed Institutions. It carries 19 platforms.

Naming them reports the contents of a public register. It is not a recommendation. Nothing here suggests that any of these platforms should be borrowed from, or that borrowing is wise. Approval means the platform met the Bank’s entry requirements. It says nothing about the price, the terms, or whether a loan is the right answer at all.

Names are added and removed as approvals are granted and withdrawn, so the live document governs, not a table reproduced anywhere else.

How does a borrower check a lender against the registers?

There are two registers, and a borrower who knows both can settle the question alone.

First, the digital lending register. The Register of List of Approved Digital Lending Platforms on bot.go.tz. The search is on the exact platform name as it appears in the app store listing, not the marketing name on the banner.

Second, the Tier 2 register. Orodha ya Watoa Huduma Ndogo za Fedha wa Daraja la Pili, kept under section 54 of the Microfinance Act 2018 and dated 14 August 2026. This shows whether the company behind the app holds a lending licence at all.

Both are linked from the Bank’s List of Licensed Institutions, and the order matters. Where the platform is absent but the company is present, the company may lend — but not necessarily through that app, and the no-objection letter for the product is the document to ask for. Where the company is absent too, the lender is unlicensed and no further enquiry is needed.

The Bank’s Public Notice of 13 May 2024 states the law plainly: the prohibition on lending without a licence includes the provision of loans through various platforms such as digital loans, citing section 16(1) of the Microfinance Act 2018. It names no apps and gives no number. It establishes that an app is not a loophole. The wider picture of which financial businesses the Bank licenses is set out in the Bank of Tanzania licensing file.

What is a loan app not allowed to do?

This is the section worth knowing by heart, because a borrower who knows that a practice is prohibited knows there is a complaint to make rather than a humiliation to absorb. The Guidance Note of 27 August 2024 prohibits the following.

The Note also requires compliance with the Personal Data Protection Act 2022 and bars offshore access to personal data.

Two things follow. Contacts access is not a technical requirement of lending; it is a collection tactic, and it is banned. And the harassment prohibition is written broadly enough that an experience need not be forced into a narrow category before it can be reported.

What happened to the 69 blocked loan apps?

Sixty-nine unlicensed digital lending applications were identified and blocked, in cooperation with the Tanzania Communications Regulatory Authority, for failing the Guidance Note of 27 August 2024. The underlying offence is section 16(1) of the Microfinance Act 2018.

That figure was reported by Mwananchi and Daily News, quoting Governor Emmanuel Tutuba on 21 November 2024. It is the reported event, not a Bank of Tanzania publication: the law is the Bank’s, the count is the press’s, and no public list of the sixty-nine names was released.

The practical lesson is about sequence. An app can be live and lending today and blocked next quarter. A block cancels no debt and returns no data already taken, which is why the register is read before the install rather than after the collection calls begin.

What must a lender show before an application?

The Guidance Note requires the lender to display, before an application is made, the interest rates, fees and charges, the late payment penalty, the payment frequency, the loan limits and the tenure of each product. Not after approval. Not in a document delivered on signature. Before.

Those six items work as a worksheet. Written down for the product on screen, a missing one is itself the finding.

A worked illustration. Take TZS 500,000 over three months. Turning a monthly rate into money is multiplication, so at 3.5% a month charged on the original amount:

• Interest per month: 500,000 × 3.5% = TZS 17,500
• Over three months: 17,500 × 3 = TZS 52,500
• Total repayable: 500,000 + 52,500 = TZS 552,500
• Monthly instalment: 552,500 ÷ 3 = TZS 184,166.67

Two points about that 3.5%. It is a statement of expected practice, reported by the Ministry of Finance in March 2025 from a financial education session, and it is not a statutory ceiling. It is a yardstick for testing a quotation, not a promise of what any lender will charge.

The second point matters more. Those figures are calculated flat — on the original TZS 500,000 for all three months, even as the loan is being repaid. Charged on the reducing balance instead, the same headline rate costs far less. That difference is worked in full on a TZS 5,000,000 loan in the flat rate against reducing balance file.

How does a borrower complain about a loan app?

The Bank’s Guidelines for Handling Financial Consumer Complaints, 2025 set a sequence, and skipping a step usually sends the complainant back to it.

The reference number in step 1 is the part to insist on. It is the provider’s own obligation, it converts a telephone call into a record, and it is the first thing the Bank asks for. The provider must also resolve within the period set by the Bank of Tanzania (Financial Consumer Protection) Regulations, 2019, and where it cannot, it must say so with reasons before that deadline expires.

SEMA NA BOT is the Bank’s own financial consumer complaints portal, reachable on the web, through its mobile application and through a chatbot. The number for the toll-free line is taken from the portal itself rather than from any third party.

The Bank has 10 days to request the provider’s response and typically 21 days to determine. There is a sanction behind that determination: a provider failing to comply with the Bank’s final determination is liable to TZS 1,000,000 per day under the 2019 Regulations. Thirty days of non-compliance is TZS 30,000,000. That is why a determination is worth pursuing rather than abandoning.

How long does a loan stay on a credit record?

Two credit reference bureaux are licensed in Tanzania — Dun & Bradstreet Credit Bureau Tanzania Limited and Creditinfo Tanzania Limited — under the Credit Reference Bureau Regulations 2012 and the Credit Reference Databank Regulations 2012.

Retention is six years, running until the expiry of six years from the date of final loan repayment, bankruptcy, assignment or write-off.

Where the clock starts is the part most borrowers assume the other way round. It does not run from the date of default. It runs from final repayment or write-off. Clearing a defaulted loan does not erase the record — it starts the six years.

An illustration, with dates chosen only to show the mechanism. A borrower defaults in June 2023 and clears the arrears in June 2025. The record runs to June 2031. Had the clock started at default, it would have ended in June 2029.

This is not an argument against paying. Paying converts an open default into a closed, repaid record, and the two read very differently to the next lender. It is an argument against believing that settlement wipes the slate the same week.

A borrower is entitled to one free credit report a year on written request; further reports are paid for. The request can be made by fax, telephone, postal mail, email or in person, with proper identification. Reading that report before applying for anything is the cheapest diligence available, and it is the same record the lender will read.

Mandate-holders this file does not replace

The Bank of Tanzania owns the Tier 2 licence, the register of approved digital lending platforms, the no-objection letter for each digital loan product, the consumer complaints guidelines and the final determination on a complaint. The Tanzania Communications Regulatory Authority owns the blocking of an application distributed through a network or a store. The two licensed credit reference bureaux own the credit record and the free annual report. The Personal Data Protection Commission owns a complaint about the handling of personal data under the Personal Data Protection Act 2022. An advocate of the High Court of Tanzania owns representation, notarisation and the commissioning of oaths. Zatra prepares, structures and coordinates the file, grants no licence and does not practise law.

What to confirm before the Client acts

• Whether the exact platform name shown in the app store listing appears on the Bank of Tanzania register of approved digital lending platforms, read live rather than from any reproduction.
• Whether the registered company behind the app appears on the Tier 2 register, taking the company name from the terms of service or the website footer rather than the banner.
• Whether the lender will produce the no-objection letter for the specific product the Client is being offered, and not merely its licence.
• Whether all six pre-application disclosures are on screen before anything is submitted, captured as dated screenshots the Client keeps.
• Whether the Client holds the unique complaint reference number in writing before escalating anything to the Bank.
• Whether the Client has taken the free annual report from a licensed bureau and read what it already says.