• Thursday, March 28, 2024
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BusinessDay

Fast Credit targets 36m unbanked Nigerians through micro loans

Update 2: CBN says N500bn debit to banks not fine, but refundable 

Fast Credit Limited, a financing house focused on providing fast and need-oriented, payroll-based consumer loans, has said it is rolling out products that will not only provide credits to low-income earners, but will also include them into the financial net.

Established in August 2014, Fast Credit is into the business of financing personal, business and emergency loans with more of its portfolio in the public sector.

According to Idechi Amucheazi, Group Head, Fintech & Innovation at Fast Credit, the company is designing products that will encapsulate the needs of the specific sector of the society, all in line with the financial inclusion agenda of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).

“Yes we have something we are currently working on for the unbanked informal sector and within the next few weeks we’ll be launching it,” Amucheazi told Businessday during a recent press briefing at Fast Credit headquarters in Lagos.

In his remarks, he added that it was important that Fast Credit knew what the financially excluded Nigerians were into and how they do it in order to design suitable products to meet their needs. “All of it will fit into our own process and we want something that will be technology driven in order to avoid the traditional way of reaching out to them.”

The national financing house licenced by the CBN will be targeting about 36.6 million Nigerian adults, representing 36.8percent of the Nigerian adult population, who do not have access to formal financial services.

“Fast Credit is into the micro lending market because there are huge untapped opportunities in the market. We provide value- based lending to this bottom of the pyramid that may not have access to credit from the traditional banking system in line with the financial inclusion policy of the CBN,” Emeka Iloelunanchi, Chief Operating Officer, Fast Credit, said.

The lender is different from some conventional credit-financing institutions because while some commercial banks require a customer to have a bank account with them before they can access loans, Fast Credit does not care if a customer has an account with them or not before giving such a person a loan.

“The bottom line is that we have entered into partnership with the relevant agencies, authorities and employers which makes our loan repayment policy seamless and this gives us an almost zero nonperforming loan ratio,” Iloelunanchi said.

The national licensed financing house has a business model that runs like a microfinance lending but as an operator, it is focused more on public sector lending, even though it also provides lending services to the private sector in the portfolio ratio of 80:20.

According to the MD, Fast Credit as a consumer lending institution focuses on salary earners in the civil service: federal and state governments’ employees, and the Para-military agencies. Going forward, the company will also be reaching out to the informal-sector operators, who are not included in the financial net.

According to the finance house which is audited by KPM, the need to ensure that the company has a good record keeping system led it to employ the services of Cleric, an account reconciliation software manufactured by PFS, a Nigerian financial software provider.

“The quest to ensure that we have good books that will also help us in our business made us go in search of a software that will help us with our accounts reconciliation,” Iloelunanchi said, adding that Fast Credit concluded that only Cleric was able to meet the pedigree and the quality that matches the company’s aspiration is Cleric from PSF, and that is why they entered into a partnership with them.

“Cleric as we have it is an account reconciliation solution and the need for this product actually came up in 1990 when the need for automation of account reconciliation was not met,” Philip Ayeni,”the DMD at Precise Financial Services.