Kivu sends money home to Rwanda for the African diaspora. No transfer fee. Our rate sits 0.99% below the National Bank of Rwanda (BNR) reference selling rate, and that distance is the only thing you pay. What you send arrives complete, unchanged, dependable.
The problem
About $502M flows into Rwanda from the diaspora every year. Around $42M of it never reaches a family. It disappears into fees and exchange rate markups most senders never see.
Rwanda diaspora remittances in 2024, up 83% since 2020. A community sending more every year, and paying more every year to do it.
Average cost of sending money to Africa, among the highest anywhere. Part of it hides in the rate. Part of it hides in the fee. You rarely see either until it's gone.
Kivu's entire cost. One open spread below the BNR reference selling rate. You see both numbers before you commit. Nothing hidden. Ever.
Why Kivu
Cheaper matters. Honest matters more. We built Kivu the way we wished someone had built it for us, and every choice starts from one question: would we accept this if we were the ones sending?
Type an amount and watch what your family would receive with Kivu, next to the industry's biggest names. Live, before you sign up for anything. We would rather earn your trust before we ask for your email.
Our rate is the BNR reference selling rate, minus 0.99%. That distance is your entire cost. No transfer fee. No fine print. And the reference rate sits right next to ours, so you can check the math yourself.
MTN MoMo, Airtel Money, or straight to a bank account. Most transfers land while you're still holding your phone. And you can watch every step, from sent to delivered.
Kivu's assistant speaks English, Français, Kiswahili and Ikinyarwanda. It knows your transfer history and answers any hour, including at 3 a.m. if that's when you send.
How it works
Simple on purpose.
Type your amount and compare what would arrive with every major provider. No account needed to see the truth.
Create your account, verify your identity once, add your recipient. Kivu handles the conversion, the delivery and the confirmation.
MTN MoMo, Airtel Money, or a bank account. Your family gets exactly the number you saw on your screen. Every franc.
The app
From the first comparison to the delivery receipt, we designed it for the people we know best: the ones who send every month and count what arrives.
Onboarding, verification, sending, tracking, confirmation. Every screen is designed and coded. Nothing on this page is a mockup of a plan.
Kivu is a FinCEN-registered Money Services Business. Identity verification runs through licensed partners, and your data is encrypted at rest.
Kivu's assistant answers in English, Français, Kiswahili and Ikinyarwanda, any hour, and it knows your transfer history.
The app keeps a running count of how much more your family received with Kivu than they would have elsewhere, across every transfer you've made.
Verification
The screen above is not a receipt we ask you to believe. It is a record anyone can open.
Every Kivu transfer carries a reference number and a QR code, and anyone can check them at kivumoney.com/verify. No login. No account. Built for the sender's family, for the skeptical brother-in-law, for anyone who needs the truth of a transfer without asking permission to see it.
A reference number on every transfer, printed on the receipt you forward.
A QR code your family scans from anywhere, on any phone.
Nothing to install, nobody to ask. The recipient's first name is all Kivu makes public.
This transfer is in Kivu's records, exactly as shown.
Kivu shows only the recipient's first name. Nothing else about them is public.
Our vision
"The African diaspora deserves a remittance service that is honest about every cost, built for their culture, and designed to make most of the money reach the people they love."
Kivu started with a simple, irritating observation: every month, our community sends money home, and every month the fees take more than they should. Quietly. We watched it long enough. Then we built the service we wished existed, where the whole cost sits in the open and the family receives the exact number the sender saw on the screen.
"A drop. Then another. Then another. Until there is a lake."
Partnership
Kivu is building the infrastructure layer for African diaspora remittances, working with leading banking institutions and licensed payment providers. We welcome conversations with institutional partners on the Rwanda side.
Rwanda-side disbursement through bank Open APIs and mobile money rails, to bank accounts and mobile wallets alike. Fast, reliable, and built to scale.
"Send to myself." Diaspora members build savings toward land, property and business goals in Rwanda. For a bank, that is a new deposit segment with proven income stability.
Years of steady transfers say something a credit bureau can't see. Transfer history as a creditworthiness signal opens lending to diaspora members the system has never counted.
The doors open soon. Join the waitlist and be among the first to send money home the way it should have always worked.
No spam. No fees to join. Just early access.