Nigeria Lags Behind in Consumer Lending, to Get Boost with New Law

Nigeria is trailing South Africa and other countries in terms of consumer lending as only 10 per cent of its loans are for consumer lending. This is lower than 45 per cent in South Africa, 33 per cent in Brazil and 18 per cent in Indonesia.

However, the signing of the Credit Reporting Act, 2017, into law on May 30 by acting President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo is significantly deepening consumer lending in Nigeria.

Speaking in an interview with THISDAY, the Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer of CRC Credit Bureau Limited, Mr. Tunde Popoola, said the new law heralds significant phenomenon in credit reporting in Nigeria.

“One thing that government has done and we must commend them is the enactment of the Credit Reporting Act. Before now, we did not have an enabling legislation that is providing cover for our industry. The Credit Reporting Act is just a very excellent way of support from government,” he said.

According to Popoola, commercial banks have not been doing more consumer lending because tracking non-performing borrowers is difficult.

“Besides, consumer transac- tions are too small and expensive to manage. There is difficulty managing millions of borrowers and nonperforming loans, fear of multiple identities and fraud. There is also the issue of wrong lending model lack of expertise, technologies and lack of unique borrower identity,” he said.

Popoola noted that apart from the Act, the Bank Verification Number (BVN) will equally impact positively on the level of consumer lending in the country.

“With BVN, means of identification is becoming easier and easier and that is assisting the efficiency of processing data because we now can identify people with their BVN rather than with their names. Before, when input a name into system, so many people come up on the system. But today, if you use their BVN, only one name comes up,” he said.

The CRC Credit Bureau Limited boss added that the FICO Score recently introduced into the country will equally boost consumer lending.

“FICO Scores will know the risk level of every borrower and able to dimension whether it is good, excellent, average or bad. And with that, you can now have dimension of relationship you want to have with such an individual,” he said.

Popoola explained that introduction of FICO Score will change the face of consumer lending in Nigeria as it will give opportunity for financial inclusion and private individuals who don’t have opportunity will now have opportunity to borrow and also give opportunity to lenders to give loans to people who have credit worthy based on the information they will get from FICO.

He said that FICO Scores is a three digit scores that is between 300 to 850, noting that the higher it is the better the person is rated and the lower it is the higher the risk that individual is carrying.

“No institution will give money to somebody with low scores. And once you have the scores (as lenders) you can now decide to differentiate who you want to lend your money to, whom you want to give your product to and the kind of condition that you want to attach to such relationship between lenders and borrowers and buyers of products and makers of products,“he said.