For many Nigerian traders, a busy shop, steady customers and regular stock purchases show that a business is working. Yet such activity may not appear in the records lenders traditionally use to assess loan applications.
That gap is at the centre of an expanded partnership between Zeeh Africa, a KYC and open banking infrastructure company, and LAPO Microfinance Bank. The companies are combining conventional financial information with alternative data to give lenders more context when assessing traders, small businesses and other borrowers with limited formal credit records.
According to Zeeh, the approach can draw on information such as transaction histories, mobile activity and informal business records. Zeeh CEO David Adeleke said the aim is to build infrastructure that helps LAPO better understand financial activity already taking place in businesses and use it in lending decisions.
The development comes as Nigeria’s financial inclusion improves, but access remains uneven. EFInA’s 2026 Access to Financial Services survey puts overall financial inclusion at 79 percent, up from 74 percent in 2023, while financial exclusion has fallen to 21 percent. EFInA says its latest survey also looks beyond access to examine financial resilience, economic participation and how effectively financial services are serving Nigerians.
Back story: why formal records still leave many businesses out
The challenge is particularly relevant to micro and small businesses operating in Nigeria’s informal economy. A trader can have regular sales without keeping the structured records usually expected by formal lenders.
PwC’s 2024 MSME Survey, using IFC estimates, put the unmet financing demand among Nigerian MSMEs at $32.2 billion, equivalent to about N13 trillion. The report identified restricted access to finance, documentation requirements and weaknesses in financial infrastructure among the issues affecting smaller businesses.
A separate Stears estimate cited by BusinessDay suggests that only about four percent of roughly 40 million MSMEs have access to formal bank loans. The figures show why financial institutions are exploring additional ways to understand borrowers.
Alternative data, however, is not the same as removing lending standards. Zeeh says it is intended to supplement traditional information with relevant financial signals. The decision to grant credit will still depend on a lender’s assessment of repayment capacity, risk and other requirements.
Women entrepreneurs and WhatsApp lending get attention
The partnership also connects with Zeeh’s Athena product, a WhatsApp-based lending service being developed for women traders and entrepreneurs.
The model is built around a communication platform many customers already use, potentially reducing friction in accessing and managing financial services. Zeeh has also said it plans to make Athena available in Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa.
The focus on women is particularly relevant to LAPO. BusinessDay reports that women account for more than 70 percent of the bank’s lending portfolio and that LAPO disbursed more than N237 billion to women entrepreneurs in 2024.
EFInA has separately identified barriers affecting women’s access to productive formal credit, including limited identification, collateral and transaction records. Better financial information could therefore become an important part of efforts to serve women-led businesses.
What the expanded partnership could mean for lenders and borrowers
At the heart of the partnership is a simple problem: economic activity can exist before a complete financial record does. Traditional credit files remain useful, but they may not capture every part of how small businesses earn, spend and manage money.
Zeeh’s infrastructure is designed to help bring financial and identity data into systems that lenders can use when assessing credit. For LAPO, the partnership adds another source of information to its lending process. For businesses, the potential change is that a wider picture of their financial behaviour could be considered instead of relying on a narrow paper trail.
The final impact will depend on how the data is used, the safeguards around customer information and the affordability of any loans offered. Still, as Nigerian businesses increasingly generate digital transaction records, those records are becoming more relevant to how lenders understand creditworthiness.
For entrepreneurs who have built viable businesses without a long formal credit history, the Zeeh and LAPO partnership reflects a growing effort to connect lending decisions more closely with actual financial activity.
