Contree: Structuring cooperative finance into a scalable digital system
Cooperative Finance
Web & Mobile
Fintech
Role: Product Owner & Lead Product Designer · 2025
Digitising cooperative finance for closed communities
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TL;DR
- ₦1.1B+ processed digitally in 10 months (up from ~₦200M manually)
- Designed a B2B2C cooperative finance platform
- Replaced manual Google Forms and spreadsheets
- Improved transparency, trust, and participation
Context
Cooperatives often rely on manual records and fragmented communication, creating mistrust and limiting growth.
Contree digitised cooperative operations while preserving the closed-community model.
When shared money starts to break
As contribution voulme increased, cooperative memebers began losing visibility into their own money
- Balances were confirmed through phone calls.
- Withdrawals required manual reconciliation.
- One ambiguous payout resulted in a ₦200k overpayment.
At that scale, ambiguity stopped being an inconvenience. It became a financial risk.
Contree started as a small internal project to fix this problem — not by changing how cooperatives operate socially, but by making shared money visible, traceable, and trustworthy.
Outcome
- ₦1.1B+ processed in the first 10 months
- Improved membership sign-ups
- Reduced admin overhead
- Improved member trust and contribution frequency
Core Design Challenge
How do you make pooled money feel personally visible and trustworthy without breaking the cooperative structure?
Key Design Decisions
- Mobile-first design across platforms
- Individual visibility within pooled funds
- Multiple contribution pools matching real cooperative behaviour
- Compliance-aware onboarding without intimidating users
Outcome
- ₦1.1B+ processed in the first 10 months
- Improved membership sign-ups
- Reduced admin overhead
- Improved member trust and contribution frequency
The problem being solved
Most cooperatives operate with
- a single bank account.
- manual or spreadsheet bookkeeping.
- limited visisbility for members.
As membership grows, this setup creates tension:
- members cannot independently confirm balances
- admins become bottlenecks
- trust depends on personal relationships, not systems.
The challenge was to digitize cooperative operations without breaking the social trust that keeps cooperatives togeether.
Designing for communities (B2B2C)
Contree is a B2B2C system:
- members need clarity and confidence
- cooperative admins need oversight and control
- limited visisbility for members.
Optimising for any one group would break the system. The product needed to balance all three simultaneously.
CONTREE MOBILE APP: DASHBOARD
CONTREE WEB APP: LOG IN
Mobile-first by constraint, not preference
Most cooperative members manage money on their phones. Contree was designed mobile-first across both mobile and desktop to reduce time to market and focus effort on the surfaces members actually use.
A desktop-first approach would have optimised for administrators and delayed trust for members — a trade-off the product could not afford.
ALL CONTREEBUTION POOLS
FLOW & AIM CONTREEBUTION POOLS
Contribution pools instead of a single wallet
A single cooperative wallet preserves opacity. It does not scale trust.
Distinct contribution pools were introduced:
- Lockbox for long-term savings
- Flow for accessible funds
- Goals for purpose-driven contributions
This made individual contributions visible while keeping funds pooled, removing the need to contact executives for balance confirmation.
KYC COMPLETION FLOW
Guardrails before convenience
Digitising shared money without guardrails creates risk.
The system embeds:
- Compliant KYC for members
- Source-of-funds declarations for AML
- Verified bank accounts for withdrawals
- Explicit confirmation states for sensitive actions
The earlier payout incident reinforced that unclear language and soft confirmations were unacceptable
DEFAULT AIMS
SUCCESS SCREEN
JOINING A COOPERATIVE
What shipped
- Member onboarding and verification
- Contribution tracking and history
- Multiple contribution pools
- Withdrawal flows with built-in guardrails
- A functional admin back office, built quickly and iterated over time
Admin tooling was intentionally kept minimal early on to prioritise member trust and speed to market.
Learnings
Withdrawals are rarely linear. Partial withdrawals introduced reconciliation complexity that required tighter coordination with the finance partner. Manual contribution inputs surfaced the need for stronger validation and operational checks over time.
