CredoLab launches in Nigeria to drive financial inclusion
CredoLab, a credit scoring financial technology (fintech) company, has officially launched in Nigeria. Singaporean CredoLab, said it is seeking to drive financial inclusion in Nigeria by providing credit score on more people, especially those who are new to banking and also new to credit.
To achieve its aim, CredoLab said it is in negotiations with the large financial institutions, digital banks, credit bureaus, consumer lenders and retail operations in Nigeria.
About half of Nigeria’s population is unserved by the financial sector and lacks access to credit, partly due to lack of comprehensive data for risk assessment. Existing options for the underbanked are limited; traditional credit scoring is inadequate, and as a result many turn to informal money lending with excessive interest.
CredoLab collects more than 50,000 data points from a customer’s smart phone through a state-of-the-art propriety mobile technology, and turns them into more than 500,000 behavioural features. The collection process is consensual and permissioned, and CredoLab said the data it collects is anonymised, securely stored within the country, and never shared with third parties. All digital scorecards are customised for clients, whose requirements, risk appetite and credit scoring thresholds are unique.
Since its founding in Singapore in 2016, CredoLab has expanded its services to 15 countries and powered almost $1 billion in loans issued after analysing about one trillion data points.