Wafacash and Money Fellows reshape Daret

Wafacash and Money Fellows have signed a strategic partnership at GITEX Africa in Marrakech aimed at digitising Daret, the traditional savings circle widely used in Morocco, in a move both companies say could widen access to formal financial tools while preserving a long-standing social practice. The agreement marks Money Fellows’ formal push into Morocco and places Wafacash, a subsidiary of Attijariwafa Bank Group, at the centre of another financial-inclusion initiative built around everyday cash and payment habits.

Daret, like other rotating savings and credit associations used across Africa and the Middle East, relies on groups of participants making regular contributions, with each member taking a payout in turn. The model has endured because it combines saving, mutual trust and informal access to liquidity for households that may not always use conventional banking channels. Academic and policy research has long pointed to the role such savings circles can play in communities where informal finance remains deeply embedded, but it has also highlighted limits around transparency, record-keeping and scalability. Digitisation is increasingly seen as a way to address those gaps without stripping away the social basis that makes the system work.

The partnership announced in Marrakech is built around that premise. According to the companies’ statement, the plan is to create a digital version of Daret that improves security, reliability and accessibility through digital management tools, scoring systems and structured onboarding. For Wafacash, the tie-up fits its stated role as a proximity-finance operator focused on lower-income and underbanked customers. For Money Fellows, it is a logical extension of a model it has already scaled in Egypt, where it says it has built a large user base around digitised money circles and broadened its offering into personal financing solutions.

Timing also matters. GITEX Africa has become a showcase for cross-border African technology and finance deals, and Morocco has been drawing greater attention as a North African base for fintech expansion. The Money Fellows announcement follows the company’s 2025 funding round of $13 million, which investors and the company linked to platform upgrades and expansion beyond Egypt, with Morocco explicitly identified as a target market. That funding lifted the startup’s total capital raised to more than $60 million, giving it the backing to pursue a heavier regulatory and operational lift in new markets.

Wafacash brings a different kind of strength. The company is part of Attijariwafa Bank Group and positions itself as a major player in money transfers and low-income financial services in Morocco. Attijariwafa Bank’s investor material says Wafacash processed MAD 66 billion in volume in 2024, underlining the scale of the network and customer reach it can put behind the project. That footprint could prove critical if digitised Daret is to move beyond a niche fintech product and into the routines of households that still rely heavily on branch-based or cash-adjacent services.

The broader policy backdrop is supportive. Bank Al-Maghrib has placed financial inclusion and payment-system oversight high on its agenda, while Morocco’s digital-finance ecosystem has been expanding through partnerships involving banks, telecom groups and payment players. Even so, the challenge for any platform trying to formalise an informal savings habit is behavioural as much as technical. Users may welcome stronger record-keeping and lower fraud risk, but they may also resist anything that feels more rigid, less personal or less responsive than the community-based arrangements they already trust.

That creates a delicate balance for the new alliance. A digitised Daret product can appeal to regulators, investors and financial-inclusion advocates because it creates data trails and potentially opens the door to adjacent services such as payments, micro-credit, insurance or credit scoring. Yet it also raises questions about fees, default handling, data protection and whether digital scoring could alter the egalitarian logic of traditional circles. Success is likely to depend on whether the product feels like a faithful upgrade of an existing custom rather than a corporate replacement for it.