I send money home. I have for years. Anyone who does knows the feeling: you send four hundred dollars, and somewhere between here and Kigali, some of it just gets taken. It never feels like much. Then you send again. And again. Over and over. Quietly, the fees hidden inside the exchange rate, where nobody prints them on a receipt, pile up, and nobody notices, because life is busy and the mind stays on what is immediate. But it adds up to a huge share of transfers that never reaches home, because sending is expensive and the mechanics are exactly as transparent as the opacity they hide behind.
I got tired of it. That is the whole origin story.
Kivu does one thing differently: we tell you the price. Our rate is 0.99% below the National Bank of Rwanda's reference and highest rate. That's it. No fee on top, no surprise inside the rate. We publish our number every single day next to the central bank's, right here on this site, so you never have to take my word for anything. And every transfer comes with a reference your family can check themselves. No app, no account. Your mother types it in and sees the truth.
Why the name? Lake Kivu is the water I come from. A lake is ancient and it is patient. It does not surge and it does not vanish. A lake holds two shores and serves the people and communities around it in permanence. That is what a remittance company should be: not a current that takes something as it passes, but a still, dependable body that connects both sides whole. Also, a lake is not filled in a day. It fills a drop at a time, the same way trust does. So we are building this the slow way: one transfer, one family, one drop. Rwanda first, because Rwanda is home. The rest of the continent after, because they have been overpaying too.
We are new and we are small. But everything on this website is a promise in writing, and you can check every one of them. That is the company I always wished existed. It did not, so I built it.
Murakoze. Asante. Merci. Thank you.