Winston Osuchukwu
For decades, credit risk assessment in Nigeria has rested on an incomplete foundation. Lenders—whether deposit money banks, microfinance institutions, or digital finance operators—price credit largely on the basis of data they alone have collected about a borrower.
This institutional insularity is often deliberate, and it costs the Nigerian borrower dearly. The concept we advance here, Personal Equity, challenges this status quo at its root.
What is Personal Equity?
Personal Equity is the quantified expression of an individual’s financial behaviour, aggregated across every institution with which they have transacted and translated into a precise, portable measure of creditworthiness. It is, in essence, a person’s credit identity—not as a single lender perceives it, but as the full breadth of their financial life reflects it.
The distinction is material. A borrower who faithfully repays a microfinance loan, consistently saves through a fintech wallet, and services a BNPL facility without default has demonstrated coherent financial responsibility. Yet under Nigeria’s prevailing infrastructure, that pattern is invisible to any lender they have not yet transacted with. Each new relationship begins from near-zero, and the borrower is priced accordingly—not because they are risky, but because their risk is unmeasured.
The Structural Problem
The Credit Reporting Act 2017 and the CBN’s bureau licensing framework were designed to address this. Credit bureaus exist as the authorised repositories for individual credit data. In principle, lenders must submit information to them and consult them in decisioning.
In practice, the system is undermined by selective compliance. Negative data is reported more consistently than positive behavioural data, and institutions that have built a granular picture of their customers have little incentive to share it with competitors. The consequence falls on the borrower: an individual whose repayment discipline and savings consistency are richly documented but poorly shared is perpetually undervalued. They overpay for credit they could access more cheaply, or are excluded from credit they objectively qualify for.
Why the Data Belongs to the Individual
The Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023, administered by the NDPC, establishes that personal data—including financial behavioural data—belongs in a meaningful sense to the data subject. Institutions are processors and controllers within defined purposes; they are not its owners. A borrower’s repayment history and transaction patterns are generated by their own conduct, and the value embedded in that data is a product of their discipline. That they cannot presently extract and deploy that value is a function of market structure, not of any principled legal position. Personal Equity operationalises the recognition that this data is an asset of the individual, making it portable and commercially meaningful.
The Mathesis Approach
Mathesis Analytics has built the infrastructure to make Personal Equity a practical reality. Our platform integrates directly with the core banking systems of financial institutions, enabling the automatic, continuous updating of an individual’s profile and score as new data is generated. Critically, our architecture is not limited to a single institution: we aggregate behavioural signals across multiple relationships and enrich them with alternative data—telco usage, utility payments, and other indicators of financial character outside the formal banking system. This matters in a market where a substantial share of the economically active population remains underbanked or thin-file. To date, Mathesis has scored over 40 million individuals and enabled more than $272 million in credit disbursements across Nigeria.
The Efficiency and Inclusion Argument
The case for Personal Equity is not merely one of borrower fairness; it is equally an argument for market efficiency. Nigeria’s credit markets are characterised by spreads that are wide relative to actual risk and exclusion ratios that are high relative to the creditworthy population—much of it attributable to information asymmetry. Lenders who cannot price an individual’s risk either exclude that individual or price conservatively, and both outcomes are deadweight loss.
This aligns directly with the CBN’s financial inclusion agenda. The challenge of inclusion in Nigeria has never primarily been one of product or distribution; it has been one of information. By creating a complete, multi-source, continuously updated picture of creditworthiness—built on the customer’s consent and consistent with the NDPA, the CBN’s open banking frameworks, and global best practice—Personal Equity addresses the gap that has kept creditworthy Nigerians outside the formal system.
Conclusion
Nigeria’s credit market has long operated on the premise that risk is an institutional perception rather than an individual reality. Personal Equity challenges that premise, asserting that an individual’s financial behaviour is a quantifiable, portable, and valuable asset that ought to work in their interest. At Mathesis, we have built the infrastructure to make that operational. The data exists. The technology exists. What remains is the collective will to deploy it.
*Osuchukwu is Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Mathesis Analytics.
