NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Tuesday, September 6, 2016

Traditional banking in Africa has failed – 80% of the continent’s 1.2 billion people do not have a bank account or access to formal financial services. So mobiles and web-based services are stepping in to fill the gap. But there is much more to Africa’s financial services story than M-Pesa, the wildly successful mobile banking platform launched in Kenya and Tanzania in 2007.

For example, Nigeria’s Social Lender looks at borrowers’ social media profiles to assess their creditworthiness.

One of the issues lenders face is that it is near impossible to obtain adequate data about people, particularly in rural areas. So mobile and web are proving useful ways of gathering it. Social Lender uses its own algorithm to assign a “social reputation score” to each user, with “social guarantors” acting like referees validating their trustworthiness.

As the youth-orientated website strapline has it: “Get rep, get cash, stay fly”.

“The solution is designed to bridge the gap of immediate fund access for people with limited access to formal credit,” says co-founder Faith Adesemowo.