The Company:
Juntos builds financial tools that help financial institutions create deeply loyal digital relationships — at scale — with their customers. Juntos is big on financial inclusion; their product serves low-income consumers who are engaging with financial institutions for the first time. They provide support with services like banking, loans, etc, by partnering with the institutions to engage them in warm, automated, two-way mobile conversations designed to build digital relationships and empower individuals to take control of their financial lives and achieve their dreams. These conversations have helped millions of people gain confidence in their financial journeys and trust in the institutions that serve them.
The company was founded in 2010 by Benjamin Knelman, Dante Cassanego, and Katie Nienow out of the Stanford Design School, with a mission to build digital mobile tools that create financial stability for low-income consumers. Their product serves both targets (the financial institutions and the consumers) really well by increasing account activity, boosting deposits, and creating the foundation of financial security.
Juntos has been an Andela Partner company since March 1, 2018.
Remote Hero Spotlight: Donna Mwiine
Judging by her fascination with drawing and Microsoft Paint in her childhood, Donna Mwiine might very well have become an artist. Today, she works as a software engineer at Andela, as a distributed member of the Juntos Global engineering team.
Donna Mwiine works from Kampala, as part of the Galapagos Engineering team at Juntos. Galapagos is the dashboard that lets Juntos partners get visibility on the interactions between Juntos and their customers. The dashboard offers actionable insights on customers’ needs and pain points and helps Juntos achieve its vision of building meaningful relationships between financial institutions and their customers. Donna has been working as a member of the team for 1 year and 9 months. To get a better sense of how Juntos’ product works, take a look at their solutions page.
Wielding Remote & Distributed Work
Donna codes in Ruby/Ruby on Rails. When I asked her about her work process, given that she works remotely from Kampala, she had this to say:
“I work with a mostly distributed team of 5 other people. We leverage video conferencing tools like Google Meet, Zoom, and Slack for our day-to-day interactions. We have a video call once a week to plan out our sprint. We also have a daily standup call to report progress and have blockers resolved if there are any. We are free to reach out via Slack at any point in the day for any reason. And when a Slack message just won’t do, it is our practice to jump on calls and quickly brainstorm, ask questions, resolve blockers and a host of other things that come up.”
Before joining Andela two and a half years ago, Donna worked as a software engineer in Kampala. She holds a first-class honors degree in software engineering degree from Makerere University, Uganda. Her journey into Andela is a story of opportunity matching with readiness and determination. She is one of the first set of software engineers hired at Andela Uganda, right after we launched operations in Kampala. As a software engineer at Andela, Donna has the opportunity to either come into the office to do her work or work from home — or anywhere. It all depends on which suits her best. Whatever she opts for, she has access to collaborate with peers across all our offices on the continent, and be able to do the kind of excellent work Andelans are famous for.
Here’s a video of her journey into Andela:
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