Any organisation looking to offer better credit services typically starts by asking the same question: What services do we begin with?
The answer differs across sectors, be it banking, telcos, digital wallets, or fintechs. And in each case, the choice of product is inseparable from the choice of platform that will power it.
Despite growth in account ownership, 1.3 billion adults globally still lack any form of formal financial institutional relationship, according to the World Bank Global Findex 2025. But the foundations for digital credit access are there: many adults own mobile phones and have SIM cards registered in their names. For operators in these markets, that gap represents a direct opportunity to provide the right offerings.
Discovering the right offering
To select the right solutions, start by examining the interactions at play. A user may be a consumer, an agent, a merchant, or an MSME, each with a distinct set of needs and behaviours. Are there difficulties that arise from the exchanges between them and the financial ecosystem? The answer matters because the offering shapes the type of customer data collected, and that data shapes everything the platform learns in the early stage.
A mobile phone operator may have information on a subscriber’s financial position but find itself unable to respond to demand for short-term credit. An agent network provider might see customers facing cash shortfalls during peak trading periods. An overdraft or line of credit restores available cash when demand is highest, without changing the lending behaviour of the agent at all.
Starting on the wrong foot could lead to gaining the wrong customer signals.
Why the right solution is also a platform decision
When choosing a solution, consider the underlying platform that powers your offering, and whether it can grow with your ecosystem while enabling fit-for-purpose products or liquidity solutions.
An unsuitable or misaligned architecture carries costs beyond the initial build. Integration alone can consume months of engineering and commercial bandwidth, time better spent building a loan book or acquiring customers. The deeper loss is the customer data that cannot be recovered when a platform is replaced.
Customer experience adds another layer of risk. Borrowers cannot distinguish between a lender and the platform it runs on. A declined transaction, a misaligned credit limit, or a poorly timed offer reflects on the operator’s reputation, not the product vendor’s.
For example, a wallet provider starts with an overdraft and later expands to nano loans. With a single-product vendor, each new integration adds cost and introduces inefficiencies that may convince customers to switch. With a platform vendor, the second product launches with repayment history, transaction patterns, and behavioural data already in the system. The risk model is smarter from day one. Each addition sharpens the system further, rather than starting from scratch.
While the gap between a platform and a vendor may not be obvious initially, the impact is felt from the second product deployment onwards.
Asking the right questions
The right question goes beyond product. Organisations need to ask if a provider’s architecture will support the full range of credit products and services needed in the subsequent years.
A provider built around one offering cannot transfer data, insights, or customer history across to the next product. Each new integration starts from scratch, leaving problems like agent downtime and merchant cash shortfalls unresolved at the platform level.
Evaluate the provider on more than today’s products. Data portability, platform design, multi-market track record, and the ability to carry customer insights forward are all important criteria.
A provider that solves the immediate problem but cannot support what comes next is not a platform partner. It is a short-term fix with long-term switching costs.
Orange Money and Ezra: Credit access across Africa
Orange Money’s partnership with Ezra shows how a consistent platform approach translates into measurable results with growth.
Orange Money operates across 17 countries in Africa and the Middle East, serving millions of customers, many of whom have limited to no access to traditional banking. The core challenge was consistent: customers had limited access to credit and no conventional financial records.
In Botswana, Orange Money worked with Ezra and Access Bank Botswana to launch N’stakolle, a nano-loan embedded directly into the Orange Money wallet. Since 2024, it has reached over one million customers and disbursed more than US$125 million in loans. With Ezra’s platform, Orange Money has a robust foundation from which to offer new products and services, drawing from the same pool of credit data and analytics.
A successful credit business begins with the right step
The right entry offering solves the real problem today and grows with the ecosystem over time. Financial organisations that choose a platform built to scale will find themselves better positioned to offer credit services that grow in value rather than cost.
To find out more about Ezra’s multi-product credit platform, reach out to our team.
