USD 60 Million and Counting: How Viaservice Is Putting Working Capital Back Into East African Trade

Every container deposit paid to a shipping line is money that stops moving. Every demurrage bill, damage charge, or total loss claim is a financial shock a business must absorb alone — or stop operations waiting to resolve. Viaservice was built to change all of that — and the numbers are starting to speak for themselves.

There is a quiet tax on trade in East Africa that rarely makes headlines. It does not appear in customs schedules or government tariffs. It is not debated at trade conferences or written into bilateral agreements. But every importer and clearing & forwarding agent who has ever moved a container through Mombasa or Dar es Salaam knows exactly what it is.

It is the container deposit.

Before a shipping line releases a container, the consignee must pay a deposit — sometimes hundreds of dollars per box — held as security until the empty unit is returned. For a business moving one container, it is manageable. For a business moving ten, twenty, fifty containers a month, it is a structural drain: capital that could be buying the next consignment, paying staff, expanding operations, or simply surviving a slow month — frozen instead in a system that was never designed with the trader's cash flow in mind.

But the deposit is only the beginning. Once a container is out, other charges can follow — demurrage for delays in returning the unit, damage claims if the container is returned with wear beyond normal use, or total loss charges in the rare but devastating event that a container is not returned at all. Each of these can arrive as a sudden, significant obligation that must be settled with the shipping line before operations can continue. For small and mid-sized traders, an unexpected demurrage or damage bill is not just a setback — it can bring an entire operation to a standstill.

This is the full problem Viaservice was built to solve. And after years of quiet, consistent work across Kenya and Tanzania, the scale of what has been returned to East African businesses is becoming clear.

USD 60 Million Unlocked — and Growing Fast

Since Viaservice launched its Container Solution, the company has unlocked over USD 60 million in working capital for importers and clearing & forwarding agents across East Africa. That figure represents container deposits that were never paid, demurrage charges that never disrupted cash flow, and damage and total loss obligations that never landed as sudden shocks on traders' balance sheets — money that stayed in businesses, kept supply chains moving, and fuelled trade.

The pace of growth makes the story even more compelling.

In 2025, Viaservice unlocked over USD 6 million in Tanzania and over USD 1.5 million in Kenya — strong numbers that signalled a market beginning to understand the value of deposit-free container release at scale.

Then 2026 arrived.

Between January and mid-year alone, Viaservice has unlocked over USD 15 million in Tanzania and over USD 5 million in Kenya — a combined USD 20 million+ in just six months. That is more than double the pace of 2025. It is not a spike; it is a structural shift in how a growing number of East African traders approach container finance.

What USD 60 Million Actually Means on the Ground

Numbers at this scale can feel abstract. But behind every dollar of that USD 60 million is a real business decision that went differently because capital was free rather than frozen.

It is the clearing agent in Mombasa who took on a second client's shipment because the first client's deposit was not tying up her credit line. It is the importer in Dar es Salaam who paid his team on time in a month when three containers were still in transit. It is the trader in Juba whose goods arrived faster because her agent could move without waiting for deposit paperwork to clear.

The Viaservice Container Solution does not just make individual transactions cheaper. It changes what businesses can do — how many containers they can move, how confidently they can grow, how quickly they can respond when opportunity arrives.

How It Works

The Viaservice Container Solution (VCS) is a sustainable and business-friendly solution that eliminates container deposits while advancing payment of container demurrage, damage, and total loss charges — all on a reimbursement basis.

The model is straightforward by design. A clearing agent or importer registers with Viaservice free of charge and gains access to the VCS portal. When a container is ready for release, they request the service through the portal and receive a VCS Certificate — the document that replaces the cash deposit with the shipping line. The container is released. Cargo moves.

If any demurrage, damage, or total loss charges arise during the container's transit, Viaservice advances those payments to the shipping line on the trader's behalf, keeping operations moving without interruption. Once the container is returned to the shipping line depot, the trader simply reimburses Viaservice for any charges advanced — without ever having had to absorb a sudden, unplanned financial hit on their own.

In Kenya, the solution now covers six major shipping lines at the Port of Mombasa: MSC, CMA CGM, Maersk, ONE (Ocean Network Express), WEC Lines, and Blue Funnel (for ESL containers). The 2026 addition of Maersk to the network is particularly significant — Maersk is one of the world's largest container carriers, and its inclusion means that for the vast majority of containerised cargo arriving at Mombasa, a deposit-free release option now exists.

In Tanzania, the solution operates through the Port of Dar es Salaam, where the USD 15 million+ already unlocked in the first half of 2026 reflects both deep market penetration and a rapidly growing base of agents and importers who have made deposit-free release a standard part of their operations.

The South Sudan Corridor: Where the Stakes Are Highest

If container deposits are a burden in short-corridor trade, they are a compounding problem on the Northern Corridor from Mombasa to Juba — one of the longest and most economically critical trade routes in East Africa.

The further a container travels, the longer it is out. The longer it is out, the longer the deposit sits frozen. And on a corridor that can stretch thousands of kilometres through Kenya and Uganda before reaching South Sudan, that frozen capital can be tied up for months.

This is precisely why Viaservice's partnership with Capital Pay on the South Sudan corridor is so strategically important. The partnership combines deposit-free container release with Capital Pay's accessible payment capability and cargo-tracking technology — giving South Sudanese clearing agents and importers not just financial relief, but real-time visibility of their consignments from Mombasa all the way to Juba.

For a market where financing costs, transit distances and cargo dwell times are among the highest in the region, the combination addresses the three things that traders on this corridor need most: capital freed, payments simplified, cargo visible.

A Platform, Not a Product

What the USD 60 million figure ultimately reflects is something more than the sum of individual transactions. It reflects a growing conviction among East African traders that deposit-free container release is not a niche financial workaround — it is a better way to run import operations.

Viaservice is not a bank. It is not a shipping line. It is an operational partner that sits at the intersection of trade finance and logistics — making it possible for businesses of all sizes to compete, grow, and move more cargo with the capital they already have.

As trade volumes across East Africa continue to grow, as new corridors open up, and as more shipping lines join the network, the USD 60 million unlocked so far is not a ceiling. It is a foundation.

Viaservice operates in Kenya (Mombasa & Nairobi) and Tanzania (Dar es Salaam). The Viaservice Container Solution (VCS) is a sustainable and business-friendly solution that eliminates container deposits while advancing payment of container demurrage, damage, and total loss charges on a reimbursement basis — in partnership with MSC, CMA CGM, Maersk, ONE, WEC Lines, Blue Funnel (ESL containers) and Capital Pay.

Learn more at www.viaservice.ch or call +255 745 540 1

90.