Digital-first lenders are proving that how a business earns and spends money in real-time is a far better indicator of creditworthiness than traditional land titles or paper audits.
For small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) across Nigeria, securing a formal business loan from a traditional commercial bank has long been an exercise in frustration. Legacy financial institutions typically demand physical collateral, years of audited financial statements, and mountains of paperwork requirements that automatically disqualify millions of viable, cash-flow-positive small businesses.
However, a massive shift in credit underwriting is underway. Armed with an immense and growing pool of transaction data, digital-first lenders are proving that how a business earns and spends money in real-time is a far better indicator of creditworthiness than traditional land titles or paper audits. Leading this charge is Nombank, the regulated banking subsidiary of Nigerian fintech giant Nomba.
As detailed in an insightful executive interview published in Our 250bn daily transaction volume allows us to lend where traditional banks can’t ,Nombank has scaled its underlying payment rails to an impressive ₦250 billion in daily merchant transaction volume. This represents a staggering leap from the ₦7 billion daily average recorded in May 2025.
According to Seun Osunkeye, Managing Director of Nombank, this massive operational scale has given the institution a distinct competitive advantage that traditional commercial lenders simply cannot replicate. By analyzing Nombank credit transaction data flowing naturally through Nomba’s extensive Point of Sale (POS) and online checkout systems, the bank can assess the financial health of a merchant in near real-time.
This data-driven approach removes traditional lending friction points entirely. Instead of reviewing outdated, annual audited statements, Nombank evaluates live transaction velocity, daily income patterns and historic seasonal recoveries. Because the bank has direct visibility into daily settlement inflows, it can safely extend short-term working capital and overdrafts without demanding land documents or physical assets. Lending facilities can be structurally tied to a merchant’s specific operational sales cycle rather than forced into rigid, monthly bank timelines.
Nombank’s corporate history is a testament to the evolving maturity of the Nigerian fintech ecosystem. Originally established after Nomba acquired a microfinance banking license, the unit was initially envisioned as an invisible utility layer to handle backend deposit mobilization and compliance for Nomba’s merchant network.
However, Osunkeye reveals that the corporate strategy has fundamentally evolved. Nombank is no longer viewed purely as backend infrastructure; it is operating as a standalone commercial banking force targeting underserved corporate and SME niches.
A major pillar of this forward-looking growth strategy is embedded finance. Rather than forcing business owners to use separate, standalone banking applications, Nombank is integrating its virtual account collection, compliance and credit structures directly into third-party industry platforms.
For instance, the bank has successfully embedded its payment infrastructure into specialized oil and gas platforms. This allows local fuel stations to seamlessly settle product allocations while simultaneously giving Nombank the clear data visibility needed to grant inventory credit during periods of tight market liquidity. The exact same model is actively being deployed across logistics networks, remittance providers and retail distribution chains.
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While the speed of fintech-native decision-making allows Nombank to approve credit facilities in days a process that typically takes legacy banks an entire quarter Osunkeye emphasizes that this agility is strictly anchored by central bank compliance. “A licensed bank isn’t a place to run startup experiments,” he notes, emphasizing that deep governance and financial discipline are core to their long-term resilience.
As Nigeria’s digital payment landscape continues to grow, the lenders who win the market will not be those with the biggest physical branch networks, but those who best understand merchant behavior. By turning daily transactional data into the ultimate form of digital collateral, Nombank is setting a new benchmark for how African small businesses access the capital they need to survive and thrive.
