So we've created a first-world infrastructure, but it's been an uphill battle to get lenders to embrace the use of bureau data and credit scores and bureau scores to make mass decisions. In Nigeria, it's a legal requirement that you perform two credit inquiries, but that's not to say that you must make good use of the data you're given, as long as you know, you've met your legal obligations. So there hasn't really been an appreciation of how that data can help you improve your decision making. So that's the journey that I've been trying to help my clients to realise - it's been as an educational upskilling, a sort of training project as much as much as a hands-on rebuild the bureau score project.

I think one of the cultural changes that's required is the willingness to invest money in order to save money, that thinking hasn't really been that prevalent in Nigeria, in the past at least. Curiously, that's the first time I've ever encountered a situation where lenders have questioned, well, why are we paying for a credit inquiry if we ended up rejecting that customer? Why would we want to pay for that? Which kind of misses the point of the protection that screening for risk gives you.

Well, let me paint a picture of the banking landscape at that time, the banking landscape in the 90s in Ghana, West Africa, we were just beginning to wake up to the advantages that digitization could bring in terms of transforming from manual processes to technology-based processes. And more of automating the manual process, rather than looking at the processes end-to-end and transforming them. Very, very basic accounting, very basic bookkeeping, and all of that.

And nothing really digital as we know it today, because still if you wanted a banking service, you had to go to the bank physically, all that really had to change was that we're able to do a lot of transactions in a shorter period of time. And our books were more accurate.

But by the mid-1990s, I had started getting a little adventurous with what we could do with the technology stack that we had.