Nomba, a Nigerian fintech platform, and Globus Bank said their on-platform credit partnership has deployed N21.3bn across businesses in Nigeria’s most commercially active sectors, achieving a non-performing loan ratio of less than one per cent.
The portfolio covers wholesale and retail (39 per cent), professional services (28 per cent), food and hospitality (11 per cent), oil and gas (11 per cent), and FMCG (8 per cent). The NPL performance, well below typical business lending rates in Nigeria, underscores the effectiveness of Nomba’s data-driven credit model.
In a statement on Thursday, Nomba said that, unlike traditional lenders, which rely on audited financial statements, physical collateral, or historical credit records, it assesses borrowers using real-time transaction data from its platform. This allows credit facilities to be sized according to actual business performance rather than incomplete historical records.
A key innovation is Nomba’s digitised collateral framework. By tying repayment to the borrower’s ongoing use of Nomba’s ecosystem, including payments, settlement flows, and business continuity tools, loans are structurally secured without requiring conventional physical assets.
The Chief Executive Officer of Globus Bank, Elias Igbinakenzua, said, “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.”
Nomba plans to scale the model further, targeting a N500bn credit book through additional partnerships with commercial banks and development finance institutions, with priority sectors including logistics, healthcare, and manufacturing.
The CEO, Nomba Yinka Adewale, noted, “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 N21.3bn. That number did not happen by accident. It happened because we built underwriting infrastructure that actually works, data that is real, collateral that is meaningful, and borrowers who have genuine skin in the game. The N500bn ambition is built on that foundation. Not on an announcement. On a standard.’
