To concentrate on expanding its new credit assessment and loan recovery solution for the Nigerian market, Lidya, the SME lending company started by one of Jumia’s original co-founders, Tunde Kehinde, closed its lending operation in Europe.
Three years after expanding its small business loan operations throughout Eastern Europe, the seven-year-old company is departing Poland and the Czech Republic. The focus will now be on Lydia Collect, a loan recovery technology that was created for Lydia’s internal SME lending business last year but has now evolved into a key component of Lydia’s new business strategy.
Co-founder and CEO of Lidya Tunde Kehinde stated in a news release that “Nigeria’s tech-savvy lending ecosystem is the ideal launchpad for our solutions, which support data-driven decision-making.” The technology that powers Nigeria’s Global Standing Instruction (GSI) is the foundation upon which Lidya Collect was built. As a last resort, linked lenders can debit the accounts of borrowers who have defaulted on their loans at other banks directly through the GSI system.
Lidya stated that Lidya Collect was constructed on top of the current GSI infrastructure in collaboration with the Nigerian Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS). The online lender also revealed Lidya Bridge, a product for credit evaluation that will go live in October 2023.
In order to streamline the process of evaluating potential new loan clients, Bridge will examine 300 data points from bank statements of borrowers. Lidya’s primary objective is to market Collect and Bridge to financial service providers and microfinance institutions. According to the firm, more than 50 lenders and microfinance banks have already signed on.
According to the business, it has examined credit application data totaling more than $50 billion from 100,000 prospective clients. Since its establishment in 2016, 32,500 of such small firms have gotten $150 million.
