The before
Msasani Coffee opened in 2022 with one café in the Msasani peninsula of Dar es Salaam. By early 2026, founder Asha Mwakasege was running three cafés plus a small roastery supplying ~20 wholesale accounts across the city — and a payment-acceptance problem big enough that her front-of-house team kept a spreadsheet of which customers paid on which network.
Tanzania has four mobile-money operators (M-Pesa Vodacom, Tigo Pesa, Airtel Money, Halopesa) with no clear majority. Customers who couldn’t pay on the network the till accepted that day either left, went to an ATM (and frequently didn’t come back), or paid late via bank transfer.
The decision
Msasani evaluated three options before signing with Letts in March 2026: a US-built specialty-coffee POS (single mobile-money rail, USD-priced, no offline mode), a regional bank’s merchant terminal (card-led, weak mobile-money UX), and Letts.
The Letts pitch was direct: four mobile-money rails first-class on one terminal. TZS native pricing. Pre-cleared paperwork on the SADC + EAC trade lanes — relevant for Msasani’s nascent export ambitions.
The 2-week rollout
- Days 1–4 — Hardware + parallel run. LettsPOS terminals shipped overnight from regional fulfilment. Each café ran the new terminal alongside the existing one for 3 days. By day 4, the old terminals were retired.
- Days 5–8 — Single reconciliation view. All four mobile-money operators consolidated into one Letts wallet. The daily MWK-equivalent close moved from 90 minutes to 8.
- Days 9–11 — Wholesale + roastery. The roastery’s wholesale accounts moved onto LettsOS for invoicing and payment terms. Eight new wholesale accounts opened in week one alone — Asha attributed this to her sales team finally being able to issue clean TZS invoices same-day.
- Days 12–14 — First export consignment. A 60kg green-coffee consignment to a Lilongwe specialty-coffee buyer pre-cleared via Letts Trade on the Songwe lane. Customs cleared in 2 hours; total door-to-door time was 26 hours.
What changed
“Tanzania’s mobile-money market is fragmented by design — four operators, no clear winner. Before Letts, we lost about a quarter of customers to ‘wrong-network’ friction. Now every payment lands.”
Three months in:
What the team mentions first:
- The till stops asking. Front-of-house no longer asks “which network?” — the customer chooses on their phone, the terminal accepts whichever, and the daily reconciliation is one number across all four operators.
- TZS-native invoicing landed wholesale accounts. Asha’s previous invoicing tool printed in USD (because the developer was based in the US); local wholesale buyers wanted TZS. The clean local-currency invoice was the unblock for eight new accounts in 90 days.
- The Songwe lane is real. Msasani’s first cross-border consignment to a Lilongwe specialty-coffee buyer cleared customs in 2 hours via Letts Trade pre-clearance. Asha is now planning a second pilot lane to Lusaka.
What's next
Msasani is opening a fourth café in 2026 (Mikocheni) and exploring Letts Eat for delivery once the platform goes live in Tanzania. The roastery’s wholesale book continues to grow on the back of the cleaner invoicing.
Asha’s parting note for Tanzanian café operators considering the move:
“Tanzania’s payment landscape is unique — four operators, none of them dominant. A platform that doesn’t treat all four as first-class is a platform that costs you a quarter of your customers. We made the change. The customers stopped leaving.”
Products used
- LettsPOS — point of sale, mobile-money (4 operators), receipt printing
- LettsOS — TZS-native invoicing, daily P&L, wholesale account management
- Letts Trade — cross-border export documentation, Songwe lane pre-clearance
Want to dig deeper?
- Letts Commerce in Tanzania — TZ-specific market context
- SADC cross-border trade — a practical guide — the export-paperwork mechanics behind the Songwe lane
- Talk to our restaurant team — happy to share more under NDA