In conversation with NIWE founder Sarah Johnson, Wonga South Africa’s Senior Digital Marketing Manager talks credit access, BNPL risk, and what real workplace inclusion looks like.
When Tina Manyanya described herself as a data nerd, she really means it. As the Senior Digital Marketing Manager at Wonga South Africa, she has spent more than five years turning consumer behaviour into actionable insight. Most recently, she discusses the research behind a 12,000-person survey on how South Africans are using credit to navigate the rising cost of living. I caught up with Tina to talk about the work, the women shaping fintech in Cape Town, and why responsible personal loans have a bigger impact than ever before in the modern lending world.
Sarah Johnson: Tina, thanks for joining us. For NIWE readers who haven’t come across Wonga before, how would you describe what the business does today, and how you ended up there?
Tina Manyanya: Thanks for having me, Sarah. Wonga South Africa is a short-term lending fintech based in Cape Town. We started locally in 2012 as part of the global Wonga Group and, after the UK arm went into administration in 2018, the South African business was taken over by a local management buyout. That moment was actually really important. It gave the team a fresh chance to build a personal loan provider that truly fits the South African market, rather than one designed elsewhere and bolted on to other geos.
I joined in January 2021 after roles at The Odd Number and Hoorah Group, mostly in performance marketing and programmatic. What drew me to Wonga was the chance to work somewhere that takes data seriously but also takes outcomes seriously. We measure success on whether a customer who came to us with a cashflow shortfall is actually in a better position afterwards, not just on volume. It’s kind of the opposite of the ‘churn and burn’ strategy that defined a lot of the online loan industry in the early days.
Sarah Johnson: You recently presented a substantial piece of consumer research, the 12,000-person survey on credit habits. What did Wonga set out to learn, and what surprised you most about the findings?
Tina Manyanya: We wanted to move past the stereotype that short-term credit is purely a sign of distress. The headline finding was a more honest, more nuanced picture: yes, more than a quarter of those surveyed rely on credit every month to cover essentials like food, transport and electricity. And around three-quarters of credit users told us they have no savings or emergency fund at all. That’s a sobering number.
But what surprised me was the other half of the story. A meaningful segment of borrowers told us they were using credit for forward-looking goals like education, home improvements, or starting a side business. So… credit in South Africa right now is doing two jobs at once: it’s a survival tool and it’s an ambition tool. That dual reality is what we wanted to surface, because policy and product design need to account for both.
Sarah Johnson: That insight feels really important. How does it change the way you communicate with customers, and the way you think about responsibility as a lender?
Tina Manyanya: It changes the tone quite fundamentally. If you assume every borrower is reckless, you talk down to them. If you accept that someone applying for R2,000 might be covering school fees or restocking a small business, you treat them like an adult making a calculated decision.
On the responsibility side, it means we have to be especially disciplined about affordability. South Africa’s National Credit Act sets the floor, but we go further. We cap what people can borrow based on what they can realistically repay, and we won’t push them past what they need. Our personal loans run from R500 up to R8,000, repayable over four days to six months, and the goal is always that the customer walks away in a better position than they arrived.
Sarah Johnson: Buy-now-pay-later has exploded globally and is growing fast in South Africa too. From where you sit, what should consumers, and women in particular, understand about BNPL that the marketing tends to gloss over?
Tina Manyanya: BNPL is genuinely useful when it’s used the way it’s described on the tin: a single purchase, split into a few interest-free instalments, paid off on time. The risk is the stacking. Every BNPL purchase is a separate loan in essence, so if you check out with three retailers in a week, that’s three live agreements, three payment schedules, three sets of late-fee triggers, and very often no single dashboard pulling it all together.
The other piece I’d highlight is that BNPL has historically sat in a softer regulatory zone than traditional credit. That means it’s much, much easier to stack your BNPL obligations than it would be to successfully obtain multiple short-term loans, for example. The BNPL rules are changing globally, but in the meantime, consumers should treat it with the same scrutiny they’d apply to a credit card. My practical advice: before you tap “pay in four”, ask whether you could comfortably afford the full price today. If the answer is no, BNPL hasn’t solved the problem. It has just rescheduled it.
Sarah Johnson: Let’s talk about women in the workplace. NIWE is built on the idea that corporate women need both visibility and structural support. What does Wonga actually do, day to day, that makes it a place where women can build careers?
Tina Manyanya: A few things, and I’ll be honest about which ones are structural versus cultural. Structurally, our leadership team and our broader workforce both have strong female representation. It’s not a token at the top with a male-dominated middle. Women lead in finance, marketing, customer experience and operations. That matters because junior women can see a credible path upward without having to imagine it.
Culturally, the thing I appreciate most is that Wonga treats flexibility as a default rather than a favour. We have working parents on the team, people studying part-time, people managing health conditions, and the assumption is that good work happens when people have the autonomy to shape their week. There’s also genuine investment in development: I’ve had budget and backing to upskill in areas like AI-driven attribution, which is not something every employer signs off on without a fight.
Sarah Johnson: What is still hard, either in fintech specifically or in the South African corporate environment, for women coming up behind you?
Tina Manyanya: Visibility in technical conversations is still the big one. Fintech sits at the intersection of finance, engineering and data, and women are often assumed into the “softer” side by default: brand, comms, people. I love brand work, but I also do attribution modelling and channel economics, and you have to be deliberate about claiming that space in the room. Junior women shouldn’t have to fight to be seen as technical.
The second is sponsorship versus mentorship. Mentorship is plentiful, and there are lots of senior women willing to give advice. Sponsorship, where someone with power actively spends political capital to put your name forward for a stretch role, is rarer. Companies that want to retain women need to measure sponsorship, not just mentorship hours.
Sarah Johnson: You’ve spoken before about being a self-described data nerd who starts the day with a coffee and a wall of tabs. What does great use of data look like in a responsible lending business, and where does it tip into something more uncomfortable?
Tina Manyanya: Great use of data, for us, is about including people that the formal system has historically excluded. Roughly 40 to 50% of South Africans don’t have access to formal credit, often because traditional affordability models can’t read informal or fluctuating income. Alternative data, things like transaction patterns, repayment history with non-traditional lenders and mobile signals, lets us assess someone the bureau effectively can’t see, and offer them a regulated product instead of pushing them to the 40,000-odd loan sharks operating outside the system.
Where it tips into uncomfortable territory is when data is used to extract rather than to assess. If you’re modelling someone’s psychology to maximise the fee they’ll tolerate, that’s not financial inclusion. That’s the predatory pattern regulators are right to chase down. The line, for me, is whether the model is trying to serve the customer better or simply trying to charge them more.
Sarah Johnson: Final question. What would you say to a woman reading this who is early in her career in fintech, finance or any technical field, and wondering whether she’s in the right place?
Tina Manyanya: Stay close to the numbers. Whatever your function, learn the metrics your business actually runs on, things like unit economics, cost of acquisition, retention, and default rates if you’re in credit. When you can speak the language of the P&L, you stop being someone who supports decisions and start being someone who shapes them. And find one or two senior people, not necessarily women, who will tell you the truth, including the uncomfortable truth. Polite feedback is comfortable; it’s also slow. The women I’ve seen accelerate fastest are the ones who asked for, and absorbed, the hard version. Fintech needs more of them.
