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Nigerian digital lending has spent the last few years living across channels: USSD for feature phone users, WhatsApp for casual borrowers, web portals for the more deliberate applicants, and agent networks for everyone the internet hasn’t quite reached. Credit Direct, one of the older players in that space with close to two decades of lending history, has now added its personal loan product to its mobile app, as well. That’s a smaller headline than a product launch, but it’s arguably a more interesting infrastructure story.
The mechanics are worth unpacking. Loan amounts, up to N20,000,000, and interest rates aren’t fixed for all applicants. They’re generated per user by a credit assessment engine factoring in employment type, income and credit history pulled from bureau screening across CRC, FirstCentral and CreditRegistry, alongside identity checks including BVN and NIN verification, device checks and liveness detection. That’s a fairly dense underwriting stack sitting behind a single “Loans” tab.
The repayment side is arguably where the more interesting product decisions sit. For salaried civil servants, repayment can be deducted at source through the employer’s payroll. For everyone else, a direct debit mandate handles it, with the app’s own wallet balance debited first if funds are available before the bank mandate triggers. That layered repayment logic, wallet first, then linked account, doesn’t show up in a product announcement but matters a lot for default rates.
