‘NPL ratio on N21.3b loan to key sectors below one percent’

“Not through luck. Not through cherry-picking only the safest borrowers. Through a fundamentally different approach to how credit decisions are made and managed. When others announce credit programmes, this is the number to ask for. It is the one that tells you whether the programme is real.,” Nomba said in a report

“It explained that the conventional explanation for poor business credit performance in Nigeria is that borrowers are too risky. That explanation is incomplete.Traditional underwriting models were designed for borrowers with audited financials, registered collateral, and documented credit histories. Many Nigerian businesses, particularly those operating at the growth stage, have none of these, not because their businesses are weak, but because their performance has never been formally captured in a form that lenders can read. The lender extends credit on thin information, misprices the risk, and absorbs losses that were built into the decision from the start. The business is blamed. The model is not,” it added.

“Globus Bank’s mission is to support the growth of Nigerian businesses, and this partnership is a direct expression of that. What distinguishes this facility is not its size. It is the quality of the underlying credit decisions. Capital deployed against verified transaction data, not against documents. The NPL performance of this portfolio is the clearest evidence of what disciplined, infrastructure-led lending can produce,” Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer, of Globus, Elias Igbinakenzua, said.

 “The Nigerian credit conversation has been captured by one question: how much have you deployed? That is the wrong question. The right question is how much has come back, and why. Our answer is a non-performing loan ratio below one per cent on N21.3 billion. That number did not happen by accident. It happened because we built underwriting infrastructure that works, data that is real, collateral that is meaningful, and borrowers who have genuine skin in the game. The N500 billion ambition is built on that foundation. Not on an announcement. On a standard,” Chief Executive of Nomba, Yinka Adewale, said.

“Nomba sits at the centre of its merchants’ transaction. Every sale, every settlement, every cash flow pattern, captured, structured, and readable in real time. When Nomba underwrites a merchant for credit, the facility is sized against live transaction, not historical documents. When risk needs to be managed, it is managed against what is happening. This is not an incremental improvement on the traditional model. It is a different model”.

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It explained that the second and more consequential structural difference is collateral. This is where Nomba has solved a problem that has quietly undermined business lending in Nigeria for decades.

“Most businesses seeking credit cannot offer the physical assets that traditional loan security requires. Land titles. Machinery. Fixed assets with clear, verifiable ownership. The conventional response to this gap has been binary: either demand collateral the borrower does not have and exclude them, or extend unsecured credit and price in the expected losses. Neither approach produces a sub-1% NPL. Neither approach produces sustainable lending at scale”.

“Nomba has built a third way. Through a proprietary digitised collateral framework, Nomba creates genuine, verifiable stakes for borrowers without demanding assets they do not possess. The mechanism works by tying the borrower’s access to Nomba’s broader platform ecosystem, including payments, settlement flows, and business continuity tools, directly to their credit behaviour.”

“Repayment is not simply a financial obligation sitting outside the business. It is structurally embedded in how the business operates day to day. The merchant’s strongest incentive to repay is not the threat of collections. It is their own interest in keeping their business running on the infrastructure they depend on.”