Nomba and a Nigerian Bank Lent ₦21 Billion to Small Businesses. Almost No One Defaulted.

Getting a business loan in Nigeria is hard. Banks want three years of audited accounts, fixed collateral, and paperwork that most small shop owners simply do not have. But a Nigerian fintech and a commercial bank just ran an 18-month experiment that changed the rules. They lent ₦21.3 billion to small businesses. Almost no one defaulted.

What Happened

In April 2026, Nomba and Globus Bank announced the results of their 18-month credit partnership. Over that period, they disbursed ₦21.3 billion (about $15.3 million) to Nigerian businesses across five sectors. The non-performing loan (NPL) ratio was below 1%.

That number means something. The industry NPL rate in Nigeria has been running between 5% and 7%. A sub-1% rate across hundreds of borrowers in five different sectors is rare in any market, let alone Nigeria's, where small business lending has long been considered too risky for most banks to bother with.

Nigeria's SMEs contribute about half of GDP and over 80% of jobs, but they receive roughly 1% of total bank credit. The Nomba-Globus result challenges the assumption that lending to small businesses is a losing bet.

The portfolio covered businesses in wholesale and retail trade (39%), professional services (28%), food and hospitality (11%), oil and gas (11%), and fast-moving consumer goods (8%).

How They Decide Who Gets a Loan

Banks normally want audited financial statements, fixed assets to pledge, and years of trading history. Most small shop owners do not have any of that. Many run their business in cash, keep no formal records, and have nothing to show a credit officer.

Nomba took a different approach. It used the real-time transaction data from its own POS and payments network as the credit file. Nomba operates over 300,000 merchant POS terminals across Nigeria. Every card swipe and transfer processed on those terminals tells Nomba something about how a business performs.

Instead of judging a borrower on what they say they earn, Nomba tracks what they actually earn. A shop doing ₦500,000 a month through a Nomba terminal builds a credit profile over time, without filing a single financial statement.

The model evaluates businesses continuously. It is not a one-time assessment. If sales drop sharply, the system notices. If a business recovers and builds volume, that gets tracked too. This gives lenders a far more accurate picture of repayment capacity than a set of annual accounts that may be months old by the time they are reviewed.

What Collateral You Need

Traditional banks ask for land, buildings, or vehicles tied to the loan. Nomba's model still accepts collateral, but it is more flexible.

Borrowers can provide:

• A 30% cash deposit of the loan amount
• Stocks or equity stakes in a company
• Stablecoins
• Physical assets such as vehicles

The cash deposit option is the most accessible for most business owners. A trader borrowing ₦1 million would need to set aside ₦300,000 upfront. That is still a barrier for many, but it is a much lower bar than pledging a property title.

Who Got the Loans

Wholesale and retail traders took the biggest share at 39%. These are the shop owners, distributors, and market sellers who needed working capital to stock shelves, pay suppliers early for a discount, or bridge cash flow gaps during slow weeks.

Food and hospitality businesses made up 11%, covering restaurants, canteens, and food vendors. FMCG businesses, the kind selling consumer goods like soap, cooking oil, and detergents, took 8%.

Professional services firms at 28% were a surprise. This group includes accountants, consultants, and service providers who do not sell physical goods but still need credit to cover payroll or buy equipment between client payments.

What Comes Next

Nomba says it plans to grow the loan book to ₦500 billion. That would be roughly 23 times bigger than the current portfolio.

To get there, the company plans to bring in commercial banks and development finance institutions as lending partners. Priority sectors for the expansion are logistics, manufacturing, and healthcare.

That is an ambitious plan. But the sub-1% default rate gives Nomba a strong case to make to institutional investors who have historically avoided SME lending in Nigeria.

The timing works in their favour. The Central Bank of Nigeria completed its two-year banking sector recapitalization in March 2026, with 33 banks raising a combined ₦4.65 trillion. The CBN has also announced plans to restructure development finance institutions to address a ₦130 trillion MSME funding gap. That policy direction lines up with what Nomba and Globus Bank just showed is possible.

Why This Matters

For shop owners and market sellers in Nigeria, the practical point is this: if you accept payments through Nomba, your transaction history may already be building a credit profile for you.

That is a new kind of asset. Most small business owners in Nigeria do not think of their payment data as something of financial value. But data on how much you sell, when you sell it, and how consistent your cash flow is, turns out to be exactly what a lender needs to make a good credit decision.

This model is not unique to Nomba. Ethiopia's digital lenders have disbursed over 50 billion Ethiopian Birr in uncollateralized MSME loans using similar alternative data approaches. What makes the Nomba-Globus result notable is that it happened at meaningful scale in Nigeria, one of Africa's most challenging lending markets, and it worked.

If this model spreads to other fintechs and payment platforms, the long-term effect could be a genuine shift in how Nigerian SMEs access capital. That would matter more to most shop owners than any policy announcement.

Conclusion

Getting a loan as a small business owner in Nigeria has always meant trying to qualify for a system built for someone else. This result suggests the system is starting to change. The next step for traders and shop owners is to understand what data their daily transactions are generating, and how that data can eventually be turned into access to capital.

Sources

• TechCabal — Nomba, Globus Bank report sub-1% defaults on ₦21 billion loans
• Technext — Nomba and Globus Bank lent ₦21.3B without defaults, now they want to lend ₦500B
• Weetracker — Sub-1% Default Rate From An Unlikely Alliance Defies Nigerian Lending
• ThisDay Live — Firms Record Sub-1% NPL on N21.3bn Credit Portfolio
• Nation Newspaper — NPL ratio on N21.3b loan to key sectors below one percent
• TechPoint Africa — Lending to Nigeria's SMEs is hard. Nomba thinks there's a better way