Adedeji Olowe

Since last Friday October 30, 2026, Lendsqr has been battling a wave of cyberattacks. Let me say the most important part first: we are safe. We have not lost money, we have not lost data, and no customer account has been compromised. 

But we are not safe because they forgot about us. We are safe because the things we built over the years have held up, and because we caught them early.

We were lucky to be in the room when it started.

The first wave hit on Friday while we were in the middle of a conversation about going live with a customer, so we watched it happen in real time. The second came on Sunday night, November 2, 2026, and we only caught it because one of our security guys happened to be awake. That is luck, and I won’t pretend otherwise. But it taught us something that the defenses you already have will hold them back for a while, but they will keep trying other doors until one open. Knowing the moment, they start is what buys you the time to shut those doors first.

We were already on the offensive.

When a few fintechs got hit around October 1 to 3, we didn’t wait to be next. We turned on ourselves and ran a full internal security review of our own code and systems, the way an attacker with the blueprints would. I honestly thought we were in good shape. We found over 800 issues, from small to serious, and we spent the next three weeks fixing them like our lives depended on them. 

Three weeks before this wave reached us. If we hadn’t, I would be writing a very different post today.

This is happening to everybody in Nigeria, and nobody is talking.

Since early October, this wave has been going through the technology world. On October 29, Binance lost about $6.3 billion after one engineer’s laptop was compromised. A week earlier, Railway, a cloud platform used by thousands of developers, told every one of its customers to change all their secret keys. Hundreds of developer accounts on GitHub have been taken over with stolen access tokens and used to steal even more.

Abroad, when this happens, companies come out and say it, and the next company learns from it. In Nigeria, we keep quiet. We fix it behind closed doors and pray the story never leaks. Then the same people walk into the next company with exactly the same trick, because nobody heard what happened to the first one. I know we are not the first company the GitHub trick was tried on. If whoever went before us had spoken up, think of how much of this we could have stopped before it started. Many of the fixes we applied between the weekend and today would have been in place weeks ago.

Every single company whose people have spoken to me in confidence over the last few days has either been breached or lost money. Not one of them has said a word in public. So I decided that somebody has to break this thing. Maybe I can afford to speak because it hasn’t hurt us. I just hope I don’t get compromised while I’m still typing this, because they are escalating by the hour.

They are fucking persistent.

The way in is almost always a developer. They steal the tokens developers use for GitHub, from infected laptops or old leaks, and use them to plant code that silently copies out every secret a company keeps in its pipelines. Some now pose as recruiters. If you are a developer going for interviews and someone sends you a “test project” to run, be very careful, because with some of these projects, simply opening the folder in VS Code is enough to compromise your machine. That is reportedly how Binance started. Somebody downloaded the wrong code.

At our own doors, they rented cheap servers, mostly in Asia, and threw them away the moment we blocked one. They scanned every public page and login screen they could find, tried to guess the passwords of staff, including staff at the lenders who use our platform, sent fake payment notifications to see what would swallow them, and in one case came in with a borrower’s correct password, stolen from somewhere else, only for our device checks to stop them cold.

This is our playbook.

The week before this started, as soon as we heard what was happening in the market, I called an all-hands meeting. You either showed up or you went home. Everybody showed up. Some of my Gen Z colleagues thought I was exaggerating when I told them I did not want to end up at the EFCC because a customer got compromised on our watch. I won’t end up at the EFCC, but the point stands: people trust us with their businesses and their livelihoods, and that is not something you play with. We have kept the whole team updated ever since.

We wrote to every developer who has worked with us in the last 6 years, asking them to revoke their tokens and clean their machines, because if somebody had warned us early, we would have been spared a lot of this, and we wanted to give them that chance. We wrote to our customers too, before anything could go wrong, which most companies here never do even after something has.

Every time we find an attacker’s address, we report it to the company hosting it and to everybody along the chain. Most of what we know about how these people work, we know because somebody else talked about it on the internet. Evil thrives in darkness, and we would rather drag it into the light.

Nobody is sleeping and I have bags under my eyes. We are blocking every network the attacks come from, and we have shut most of Asia out of our services while leaving room for the places our customers actually are. Cloudflare is blocking a lot of the noise automatically. When we kill one batch, we sit down and ask ourselves how they will come back, and then we attack ourselves first. We use Hinoki Security for this, and I strongly recommend it. Hinoki is a cybersecurity company built on one idea, putting attacker-grade tools in the hands of defenders, and it probes your systems the way a black-hat hacker would, starting from your DNS records and working inwards. We learned a lot about how these people think just by watching it work.

AI has been unbelievable through all of this. Pulling logs together and seeing the full picture across Cloudflare and our own systems takes very smart engineers three or four hours. We are doing it in ten minutes. Dario of Anthropic is insufferable and I totally dislike him. But his Claude Opus 5.5? Fucking awesome. And if you’re dealing with an attack, don’t bother with the Fable models. Their tripwires kick in and they won’t do anything useful for you. I also want to give a big shout-out to Muyiwa Olufon, founder of Technology and X, former Global CISO at Flutterwave and Head of Information Security for Nike International, and a real fighter for the Nigerian tech ecosystem, who helped us when we needed it. If you need someone to help you jam the door shut, reach out to him.

Blocking this hard has a cost. Over the next week or so, some of our customers may notice the odd glitch, or a customer who is travelling may struggle to reach an app. That is a price I am willing to pay, and we will fix anything that breaks the moment we hear about it.

If you are a developer, do this today.

Go into your GitHub right now and revoke every token you have ever created, then make new ones. Scan your machine before anything else. Don’t run code or open projects from people you don’t know, no matter how juicy the job sounds.

If you run a company, do this today.

Turn on two-factor authentication on email, cloud, code and every console that touches money. Remove everyone who has left. Change your API keys and passwords, especially the ones that have ever sat in a chat or a shared document. And when somebody asks you to change where money goes, pick up the phone.

If these addresses have visited you, look closely.

The first wave, between October 30 and November 2, used stolen developer tokens against code repositories from these addresses:

• 66.55.76.127 (Kamatera, Los Angeles)
• 166.88.8.133 (Evoxt, New York)
• 95.135.181.151 (a leased range routed through Virtuo)
• The second wave, between November 2 and 3, came at our platforms directly:
• 103.151.172.0/23 (Hong Kong, network AS134972)
• 141.11.146.78 (Hong Kong, AS134972)
• 43.243.192.91 (Hong Kong, AS134972)
• 103.42.183.18 (Hong Kong, AS62468)
• 223.91.198.216 (China Mobile)
• 18.182.61.18 (Amazon, Tokyo)
• 142.249.39.80 (Back Waves, AS153371)
• 38.91.101.149 (GTHost, New York)

They mostly used the command-line tool curl (versions 8.22.0 and 8.20.0), cycled through staff logins every few seconds, flooded password resets, and tried to reach the cloud metadata address 169.254.169.254 through public pages. If any of these show up in your logs, assume someone was testing you, block them, and check what they touched.

None of this is new. That is the point. They are winning because we are quiet, and because we keep leaving the same doors open. Being aware is the fastest way to stop them.

Speak up. Fraud thrives in darkness.

If you spend your energy wishing for smarter customers, your business will definitely grow – downwards!. The best customers a founder can have are the ones who look “dumb” on the surface. I put the word dumb in quotation marks on purpose, because nobody who pays for a product and sincerely tries to use it deserves the label.

Most customers are capable adults who live in a different context from mine and yours, and the gap between their worlds and my own little bubble is where most of a product’s growth sits waiting to be found. A founder who learns to read that gap as information will build a better product than one who reads it as a character flaw in the people paying the bills to keep the founder’s kids in school.

Everybody is dumb somewhere

I sometimes consider myself fairly sophisticated, and I still have a long list of things I can’t do by myself. In fact, the list is longer than the number of hours it has taken me to move open banking from concept into everyday use. A good number of them land on my Assistant, who has the misfortune of being the person I hand things to when my patience runs out. When she isn’t around, I call friends and ask how to do whatever has me stuck, usually with the tone of someone who expects the answer to take anywhere from thirty seconds to thirty days.

In the same vein, my friends also reach out to me in the same way, asking how to do X and Y, and I answer them with the patience I hope to receive. Everybody is an expert in their own corner and a confused retard in someone else’s, so the context behind a question matters more than the question itself.

When I look at the most successful products we have built, they share one trait. People can discover and use them without anybody walking them through a process, sending a guide, or booking a call. Nobody had to explain why the product existed or where to click first, and the customers who adopted those products were no smarter than the ones who struggled with our weaker features.

We had put in the work to fit the product into their context, which meant using words they already use, showing them one obvious next step, and filling in whatever we could on their behalf. A loan officer at a microfinance bank who sits down to set up a loan product has a head full of interest rates, tenures, and repayment rules from years of doing this on paper, and they will move fastest in software that speaks to them in those same terms. Our internal vocabulary matters very little to them, and every label that sounds like it came from an engineer is a small tax on their afternoon.

Why can’t they click the button?

This is a constant battle I fight internally. My team is young and still growing, and I understand the instinct that comes up in product conversations. Someone says we have already trained the customer on how to use this feature, we showed them exactly where it lives during onboarding, so why can’t they click that thing? I sympathize with the frustration, since the team has put a lot of effort into the explanation and it stings when customers still get lost.

I also know where that line of thinking ends. If you have to train customers to use your product, you won’t go very far, because every customer you add to the business adds another training session you have to deliver. Do we train people at Lendsqr? Yes, we do. I know fully well, though, that if we are going anywhere, the product has to be super intuitive, which means training stays an optional extra for the customers who want to go deeper and never becomes the price of getting started. A product that needs a facilitator in the room caps its own growth at however many facilitators you can afford to hire, and that number is always smaller than the number of customers you hope to serve.

The habit I push on my team is to watch a new customer use the product without saying a word to them. Sit beside them or join the screen share, keep your hands off the mouse, and write down every moment where they hesitate, scroll up and down looking for something, or open a new tab to search for an answer. Ten minutes of that will teach you more than a month of internal debate about whether a button is visible enough. I also like testing with people outside the company, and my friends have been unwitting participants more than once. If someone smart who has never seen the screen before cannot finish the task on the first attempt, then the screen needs another pass, regardless of how obvious it looks to the people who built it.

Nobody reads the manual

If you think customers are a nuisance when they complain, you are in the wrong business. Every complaint is a customer telling you for free where your product fell short, and each one should send you back to the same exercise of asking how to make that step easy enough that nobody has to read documentation to get through it. If your customers have to read your documentation to use your product, you are in serious trouble, since nobody likes to read.

I include myself in that. I don’t like reading documentation to do anything, and I can’t remember the last time I opened a manual for a product I bought. When you buy a TV, you plug it in and press the power button. Only when the screen stays dark do you start wondering how this thing works, and by then your goodwill is already running low. The best products ask the least of you, so you spend your attention on whatever you bought the product to do and very little of it on operating the product itself.

Plenty of small decisions get you closer to that standard. Forms can ask for fewer fields and fill in whatever the system already knows. Defaults can be set to the choice most customers would make anyway, so a first-time user can click through and still end up with something sensible. Error messages can name the exact problem and tell the person what to do next, which beats a vague code that sends them to a help article. Empty screens can show a sample of what the page will look like once it has data in it, and each screen can carry one obvious primary action so the eye knows where to land. 

Support teams have a role here too, because if an agent finds themselves explaining the same step twice in a week, that step belongs on the product team’s list. Documentation still has a place, and I would like it to be where customers go for depth after the product has already gotten them started.

Confused customers are free research

If you have a product today and customers keep telling you they don’t know how to do something, or they drop off halfway through, you are in good shape. Confused customers are the best resource money can give you, because they point to the exact step where your product loses people and they do it without charging a Big 4 consulting fee. 

Keep working on the product until customers can complete everything end to end without you telling them anything and without any form of assistance on your side.

A few practical habits help you collect this research. Look at your funnel and find the step where the largest share of people stop, then treat that step as the most urgent need-to-fix. Read your support tickets every week and tag them by the screen or feature they mention, because after a month the tags will show you where the confusion piles up. 

Measure how long it takes a new customer to reach their first useful outcome, and keep trying to shorten that number. Ask the people who sit on support calls to share the three questions they heard most often, and give those questions a place in the next sprint planning meeting. None of this takes a large budget, and all of it keeps the team pointed at the people who use the product.

That is my mantra at Lendsqr going into the new year. I want to dumb things down so far that customers never have to spend one extra brain cell to get something done. Every hour we put into that effort pays back in fewer support requests, faster adoption, and customers who feel clever for using our product. So yes, “dumb” customers are a blessing in disguise, and I would take a thousand of them over a handful who needed no help at all.

I have come to believe WhatsApp might be the best channel anyone in African fintech has ever had access to. I say this as someone who spent years building on the opposite assumption. Financial inclusion has been a stated mission across our industry for a long time, and the results so far have been underwhelming enough that I recently found myself laughing about it on a panel.

I had been invited to speak at a financial inclusion event, and somewhere between the sessions a group of us started joking about how many tech bros, myself included, had gone off to build our apps for mobile phones. Every one of us believed our app would be the one to finally “bank the unbanked”.

Although we all might have had good intentions, every new app meant asking people to download, create an account, remember a password, and figure out an interface designed by someone who has never had to explain a loan to their grandma. The laughter in the room that day had the particular warmth of people recognising the same mistake in each other, and I left with a lot more to think about than I had arrived with. 

Simple products spread on their own

Building for inclusion turned out to be far more complicated than any of us expected, and the one lesson I keep returning to is that people will find their way to a product once it is simple enough. People work out their own way in, usually by watching a friend (or some enemies) do it once or by asking a colleague at the next desk, and no tutorial or launch campaign has ever matched the speed of a neighbor saying, “just send it to me on WhatsApp”.

And recently I’ve begun looking at the market penetration of one app almost everyone I know already opens every day. I am sure some people, even toward the lower end of the income pyramid, do not use WhatsApp, and I cannot claim to know every household in every country where we work, but nearly every person I know has it. They check in when they have data, reply when they can, and the conversation is still there when they come back.

So here’s what I think; a product that fits into how people already communicate asks nothing new of them, and a lender trying to reach a first-time borrower has very little to lose by showing up in the app that borrower opens forty times a day, and I wish more of us had thought about it years ago.

Somebody else got there first, and I was a fan

Our own decision to build on WhatsApp was set off partly by a guy called Xara, who launched a similar product in payment either earlier this year or late last year; not too sure of when, as my memory has been corrupted by school feels and daddy day care things. We loved what he made and it propelled me to get in touch with him because I wanted to know how he had approached it, and since we already admired the product, I asked whether he would like to come over to Lendsqr or build something similar for us, of which he said no to both offers, because he was focused on his own product at the moment and had no interest in splitting his attention.

I respected his answer a great deal, because a founder with a clear sense of what he wants to work on, and one who knows his lane is a pleasure to deal with, even when he is turning down your offers one after the other. 

His product also confirmed something I already suspected. Getting a loan is a harder problem than moving a payment, because credit involves trust, documentation, back-and-forth, and a lot of explaining. If a chat interface could make payments easier, I wanted to find out what it could do for borrowing.

So, we began to build ours

The project began with someone on my Growth team, who started building the first version before engineering dragged him over to their side, where he nonetheless continued building. The work he started became the foundation of what we have today, and the idea behind it is that a customer should be able to have their entire credit experience inside WhatsApp, wherever they happen to be that day. Our first version was rough in the way first versions tend to be. It behaved like USSD running inside WhatsApp, with numbered menus and fixed responses, and it did the job well enough for us to see the potential.

We then spent time polishing it into something people would want to open. Today you can talk to it the way you would talk to another person. You can send a voice note, send a screenshot of a document or a transfer, and write in whichever language you are most comfortable in, and it understands what you mean. It does not care how you spell anything, which matters a lot when you consider how many of us type in a hurry, on a small screen, in a second or third language. A few steps still use forms, onboarding being the main example, because some information has to be collected in a structured way. 

Beyond that, the experience runs on conversation, and the mood we aim for is closer to chatting with a helpful friend. We have been trying to give it a personality and a helpful tone, and I will admit that part has some way to go before I am satisfied with it. 

Why a chat feels safer than a bank branch

The question I care about most right now is how we help customers get the best access to credit, and my younger brother has taught me more about it than any research report. He is sophisticated and well-traveled, and he has seen how institutions work in several countries. Yet, I’d stake millions on the claim that there’s no one I know who hates banking halls more than he does. 

A branch feels overwhelming to him, with staff who know the system inside out and customers who are expected to keep up without being told the rules. People like that tend to get run over in those settings. If a sophisticated, well-traveled man in his forties feels that way walking into a bank, I can only imagine how a first-time borrower feels when he is already nervous about asking and unsure whether he will be taken seriously. I think this explains a large share of the people who never engage with their banks at all, and I do not think we talk about it enough, because we tend to assume that people stay away for lack of information when plenty of them stay away because the experience makes them feel small.

A conversation on WhatsApp takes most of that pressure off. You can explain your situation to your lender or your bank in your own words and at your own pace, without anyone watching your face while you work up the courage to say what you need. You will not feel embarrassed or ashamed, since nobody is standing behind you in a queue and nobody is sighing at the hesitation in your voice. The chat can also ask you follow-up questions and guide you toward the option that suits your circumstances, which is a kind of attention that most application forms have never offered anyone. I would like us to create a safe space for people to engage with credit, a place where asking a basic question carries no cost, and I think a conversational channel on one of the most popular chat apps might be one of the best ways to build it.

What happens next, and where else this applies

Now that I’ve seen firsthand how much ground we can cover in reaching customers where they’re most comfortable, I sincerely hope other industry builders will build in this direction as well, because the more lenders who meet customers in conversation, the healthier the market becomes for everyone, including us. 

For our part, we plan to make the product available to some of our lenders before the end of this month. And by December, it will be an option for all our lenders across the eight countries where we currently operate. We are doing this because we believe it is among the best things we can offer customers, and I would say the same even if nobody else were watching.

If we want to bring about financial inclusion, we have to build where people already are. Too often we get absorbed in designing for sophisticated audiences, and we forget that most of the people we claim to serve are on a very different footing from the people in our product meetings. 

The same thinking applies well beyond lending, and if I had the balls and brain (-read as; 7+ years of med school) primary healthcare is the next area I would look at. WhatsApp could be a way to reach patients where they are, whether that means answering a first question about a symptom, sending appointment reminders, or helping someone work out whether a clinic visit is needed at all. Plenty of people put off care for months because the first step feels intimidating or expensive, and a familiar chat window lowers that first step considerably.I expect we will see more of this across sectors over the next few years, and I am looking forward to watching it happen.

Whenever the conversation turns to people who do not repay loans in Africa, the answer most people reach for first is poverty, followed by the idea that the loan was too large for the borrower to carry in the first instance, and after a while someone suggests the borrower was taken advantage of by a lender with harsh terms. 

I understand why these explanations are popular, because each of them comes with a story one can easily picture themselves in considering the economic reality of the average African. I’m not too far gone to admit that indeed some of these claims truthfully apply to a number of borrowers, and I would never wave those cases away.

Be that as it may, my polarizing view comes from years and years sitting on loan data from many lenders, daily interaction with these lenders and borrowers alike. In the last decade I have had the privilege of supporting thousands of credit providers with technology to power their lending which means I have watched repayment behavior across a very large number of portfolios and over a long stretch of time. 

Having seen it first hand, I can say that practically 95% of the defaults I have come across have nothing to do with a borrower being taken advantage of or having no money. Most people who default don’t want to repay the loan at all, and once you accept this, a lot of the behavior lenders complain about starts to make sense.

A bad credit score costs more in some countries

The reason unwillingness works so well for borrowers in emerging markets is that there is very little consequence for not paying a loan. In the US and in most developed countries, a person who stops repaying a loan watches their credit take a beating, and the damage follows them into ordinary parts of life. Renting a house becomes a problem because whoever is financing it will check your credit history. Forget about even purchasing a house; the banks will nicely usher you out of their offices. Buying a car runs into the same wall, and a whole list of other things you would like to do becomes harder or impossible until the record improves. Those societies are built on credit, so once your credit record is in bad shape, a large part of your ability to function goes with it.

Africa and other emerging markets are a different situation entirely. We have credit bureaus, and lenders can report to them, but the foundation of the society itself was never laid on verifiable credit, so a damaged record seldom stands between a person and whatever they want to do next. Where consequences are this thin, people test the limit, and this has nothing to do with whether someone is poor, middle class, or rich. Every single person, at every income level, is always looking for how far they can push a situation before it pushes back, and a lending system with no memory gives them a lot of room to push.

Ask the people making the collection calls 

I know all this because I work with lenders who sell loans to many people, and when repayment time arrives those lenders are on the phone chasing money. Borrowers get called repeatedly, tempers flare on both sides, and plenty of them shrug it off with the observation that everybody owes somebody, since even the government is owing money. If someone with an outstanding loan goes to apply for another one somewhere else, very little stops them, and that says a lot about how the system treats a person who has already walked away from a debt. What finally gets a borrower to pay tends to show up when it is time to travel.

A friend of mine works in a commercial bank, and he told me about something interesting he found when he moved into a senior role at the bank. As part of his new role, protocols existed that meant he had to interact with records of people who owed the bank money and on one of those interactions, he came across a familiar name of a man whom he knew personally who had a flamboyant or as Lagosians would call it jaiye-jaiye lifestyle, but owed the bank an unspeakable sum of money.  The bank of course had reached out to him on different occasions, but he showed no interest in paying, so the debt sat on the books for years. Until the japa wave hit him and he had to move his family to Canada, unfortunately for him this meant credit history issues AKA ghosts from the past had come to visit. It came as no surprise to no one when the man who barely returned the bank’s calls suddenly paid off his loan in one go.

I have watched this pattern repeat again and again and again. Many people who plan to go back to school for a master’s degree get told by friends and colleagues to go and pull their credit report first, and within days a good number of them develop a strong interest in settling loans they had ignored for years. Their income was the same the week before as the week after, so the money to pay was always somewhere within reach, and the thing that brought about the sudden change was a consequence with a date attached to it.

Fixing it starts with the bureaus

So the foundation of this problem is the absence of consequence, and my answer to it goes back to the credit policy I mentioned earlier. At a minimum, the country needs to enforce that lenders must report to credit bureaus; Transunion, Creditinfo, Xdr, Experian, CRC, FirstCentral and the likes. This is the first step, and what it does is bring us to a level where a person can default only once before it holds them back. 

Today people take money from one lender after another, knowing that even if they fail to pay the current one, somebody else will hand them cash next month. That bad behavior sits at the bottom of the whole thing, and every lender who extends credit into it pays for the ones who came before.

If we manage to put reporting in place and build a credit-driven society, whatever default remains will be left to inability, and I have good reason to think this portion is smaller than most people expect. Lenders can seem very high-handed, yet most of them are able to restructure loans, and many borrowers with a genuine repayment struggle never go to their lender at all. 

When people do speak to lenders about their situation, restructuring happens, which tells me a good share of the inability problem can be handled with a conversation that many borrowers avoid. There is also a second effect worth mentioning; someone who has taken a loan before and has not paid will have that history sitting with the credit bureau, and they will struggle to get a loan somewhere else. That means many of these borrowers would never end up holding a pile of loans they cannot pay back in the first place.

Consumer loan default in Nigeria, and in Africa generally, comes from a combination of unwillingness and inability, and I can say this with confidence after everything I have seen. Inability exists and deserves a proper response from lenders, yes. But unwillingness is so pervasive that it makes up the bigger problem.

If I had a dollar for every person I’ve watched sign a loan contract without reading a word of it, I would be a retired billionaire with one of those super yachts in Monaco or just lounging in one of my many old Ikoyi homes. Unfortunately for me and me alone, this discovery has never translated to money. 

And while you may think, this old man is only trying to exaggerate, I promise you that’s not the case at all. This is the ordinary condition of consumer lending almost everywhere, and it gets worse the further down the income ladder you go. People rushing to solve a problem, whether it is school fees due next week or a business that needs inventory before the market opens, will skip past the fine print because the fine print feels like an obstacle between them and the money they need right now. 

And the fine print, as anyone who has ever been burned by a contract knows, is where all the consequences live. A misplaced comma, a clause about compounding interest, a line about what happens after day 30, these are the things that decide whether someone comes out of a loan intact or comes out of it owing three times what they borrowed. Sometimes including their kidneys.

There is a version of this problem where you could call it negligence. I mean, someone with two eyeballs, a university degree, a stable salary, and the time to read a contract who chooses not to read it has made a choice for sure, and there is an argument that the consequences of that choice belong to them. But that argument begins to fall apart the moment you look honestly at who truly needs consumer credit in an emerging market like ours. 

Across Africa and most emerging markets, credit invisibility tracks poverty almost perfectly, and poverty tracks limited access to education almost as closely. The people who need a loan the most are frequently the people least equipped to interrogate the terms of that loan. They are not being negligent when they sign without understanding. Oftentimes, no one sat them down and explained what they were about to sign before they signed it.

Nobody signs up to be exploited

Now here’s the hard-to-sit-with part of this conversation we shy away from. If you refuse to lend to people who might not fully grasp the terms, and you’ve decided that access to credit is a privilege reserved for the literate and the comfortable, which defeats the entire point of financial inclusion. But if you take the opposite position and treat every borrower as a fully informed adult who understands what they signed, and you’re pretending that even educated people don’t get tripped up by loan terms, then you’re being dishonest.

Most borrowers have no idea some lenders capitalize unpaid interest, folding it back into the principal so the balance grows even as they’re making payments. And in certain cases, some lenders build in punitive penalties that only reveal themselves after a missed payment. A few “good” lenders build in restructuring options that could genuinely help a borrower in trouble, but since nobody reads the contract in the first place, those options sit unused while the borrower panics and disappears instead.

Sadly, the people this hits hardest do not know what happens after a missed payment, nor do they expect to be reported to a credit bureau, and they are often blindsided when a collections call arrives, because in their mind, being broke or sick or unable to pay is a good enough reason. Some of them borrowed for reasons that had nothing to do with cash flow planning in the first place, a wedding or as the Yorubas would say owanbe, a burial, an obligation that culture and family pressure made non negotiable, and only realized afterward that they had no plan for repayment. 

A non-negotiable ethic the industry must uphold

Before getting into what responsible lending should look like in practice, I want to be straightforward about the part of this that is not gray at all. While most ethical questions come with shades of complexity, deliberately hiding terms from people who cannot protect themselves, or structuring a loan so that a borrower has no real path to walk away once they understand what they signed, is deeply wrong. 

There is no framing of business necessity or market competitiveness that makes it acceptable to trap someone who did not have the means to see the trap coming. Lending to people you know cannot meaningfully consent to your terms, and doing it because their vulnerability makes them profitable, deserves to be called exactly what it is.

I say this with the weight of something I watched happen firsthand. Years ago, while I sat on the board of one of the larger fintechs operating across Nigeria and the wider African market, one of our own employees, a young man in his early twenties working inside one of the better fintechs on the continent, took his own life after taking out a loan he could not repay and finding himself under pressure he could not withstand. 

I have not forgotten it, and I do not expect to. If someone working inside the industry, with more visibility into how lending works than the average borrower will ever have, can be pushed to that point, it tells you something about how much damage an unmanageable loan can do to a person who has far less protection than he did.

Tala went through something similar in Kenya, where several of their customers died by suicide tied to loan pressure, and I want to be careful here, because Tala is not a company I would call predatory or reckless. Plenty of what they built was genuinely good for financial inclusion. But even well-intentioned lenders can create conditions that break people, and that should sit with every founder and executive in this industry as a reason to build differently, not as a scandal to distance yourself from. 

What does responsible lending look like for the average lender?

Regulators like Nigeria’s FCCPC, and similar bodies across Africa, are already pushing towards a more responsible lending terrain with tough enforcement, and I think they are right to. Loan terms should be plain enough that nobody needs a law degree to understand them.

There is room for sophisticated, layered products aimed at middle class or highly educated borrowers who want that complexity, but for everyone else, the terms should be stated in the most direct language possible. Borrow $100, repay $120 over six months at $20 a month, full stop, with every fee disclosed upfront. If there is a penalty for missed payments, it should be disclosed clearly and it should be capped, so a borrower who falls behind is not staring at a debt that has doubled in size. 

Communication matters just as much as the terms themselves. A borrower should hear from their lender before a payment is due, not on the day it is due and certainly not after. For a loan repaid monthly, a reminder a week ahead gives someone time to plan. For a loan repaid weekly, three days ahead does the same job on a shorter cycle. 

When a payment is missed, the lender owes the borrower ongoing, human communication before escalating to a credit bureau report or anything more severe, and that communication should always include an open door to restructuring, offered without an additional fee attached, because charging someone to fix a problem you could have helped them avoid defeats the purpose of offering the option at all.

Interest capitalization deserves particular scrutiny when the borrower is vulnerable. Letting unpaid interest fold back into the principal can make a loan balloon out of proportion to what someone can reasonably work their way out of, and once a borrower reaches that point, frustration turns into resignation, and resignation is where the worst outcomes come from. 

How you and I can uphold responsible lending

A lot of what I have described so far comes down to something far less complicated than it sounds. When a lender suspects a borrower is under pressure, or worries that person may not fully grasp what they are agreeing to, the answer is as basic as a phone call. 

Ask the borrower directly whether they understand the loan and whether they have a plan for what the money will actually be used for, and let their answer guide what happens next. Where it is possible to hand over goods instead of cash, inventory for someone running a small business, tuition paid straight to a school rather than routed through a parent’s account, lenders should take that path every time, because it closes off an entire category of misuse and diversion that cash lending leaves wide open for vulnerable borrowers.

None of this asks lenders to reinvent how they operate, they’re merely choosing transparency over obscurity and patience over aggression, and both of those are choices sitting well within their control. A lender who will not build in these protections has decided, whether they say it out loud or not, to profit from a borrower’s confusion, and there is no gentle way to describe what a business built on that foundation deserves.