Nomba and Globus Bank lent ₦21.3B without defaults, now they want to lend ₦500B

Picture a small business owner in Lagos, a wholesaler in Onitsha, and a restaurant operator in Abuja. They need a loan to grow, walk into a bank, and the bank asks for audited financials, land titles, and a documented credit history. They have none of those things, not because their business is failing, but because nobody has ever formally captured how well it is actually doing. The bank says no. The business stays stuck.

This is the story of business lending in Nigeria. It is not a story about bad borrowers. It is a story about a broken system, one built for a type of borrower that most Nigerian businesses are not and may never be.

Nomba and Globus Bank are announcing today that they have been quietly building a different system, and the results are worth paying attention to. The two companies have deployed ₦21.3 billion in credit to Nigerian businesses across wholesale and retail, professional services, food and hospitality, oil and gas, and FMCG. The non-performing loan ratio on that entire portfolio is below 1%.

For context, that number is extraordinary. Business credit NPL ratios in Nigeria routinely exceed 5%, and many portfolios go well beyond that. A sub-1% ratio across five different sectors and hundreds of different borrowers is not something this market produces often. The Central Bank of Nigeria has flagged rising NPLs as a persistent concern across the banking sector. Nomba and Globus Bank are heading in opposite directions.

The reason comes down to how Nomba knows its borrowers before it lends to them. Nomba is a payments and banking infrastructure company, which means it already sits inside the daily operations of the merchants it serves. Every transaction, every sale, every settlement that passes through a merchant’s Nomba account is captured and structured in real time. When Nomba decides whether to extend credit to a merchant, it does not read a document that may be months old; it reads what the business actually earned last Tuesday.

That changes everything about how credit decisions are made. The loan is sized against what the business genuinely earns, which means it is less likely to be too large to repay. The risk is managed against what is happening in the business today, which means problems are caught early rather than discovered too late.

The other piece of the model is more creative. Most small businesses in Nigeria cannot offer the kind of collateral banks traditionally require: land, machinery, fixed physical assets with clear ownership.

Nomba uses live data

Nomba has built what it calls a digitised collateral framework, and the logic is elegant. Instead of demanding assets the borrower does not have, Nomba ties the borrower’s access to its own platform ecosystem, including payments processing, settlement flows, and the day-to-day tools the business runs on, directly to their loan repayment behaviour.

The merchant is not repaying because a collections agent called. They are repaying because their business depends on staying in good standing with the infrastructure that keeps it running. That is a fundamentally stronger incentive than a threat.

Yinka Adewale, CEO, Nomba

Elias Igbinakenzua, MD and CEO of Globus Bank, pointed to what the number actually proves.

The next step is scale. Nomba and Globus Bank plan to expand their partnership to attract more institutional lenders, including commercial banks and development finance institutions, with a focus on logistics, healthcare, and manufacturing. The target is a ₦500 billion credit book.

That is a large number, and in a market full of large credit announcements, it will rightly be met with some scepticism. But Nomba is making an unusual offer: ask us about the NPL ratio when we get there.

If the model holds at ₦500 billion the way it has held at ₦21.3 billion, that will be the answer to every question about whether Nigerian businesses can actually be lent to at scale.

The wholesaler in Onitsha, the restaurant owner in Abuja, the small business that a traditional bank turned away, that is who this model is ultimately for.