Uzoma Dozie arrived at AFIS 2026 in Luanda with a pointed argument: the gap between who funds Nigeria's banks and who actually benefits from their lending is not an accident. It is a design flaw. Small businesses and mass-affluent individuals make up a significant portion of the deposit base that keeps commercial balance sheets healthy, yet those same businesses receive less than 1% of total bank lending when they come looking for credit.
Dozie, who leads Sparkle Microfinance Bank and previously ran Diamond Bank, laid the problem squarely at the feet of traditional collateral thinking. Speaking to TechCabal at the summit, whose central theme was "Making Capital Count", he said conventional lenders simply do not trust the information small businesses can offer. "Capital tends to flow towards areas of certainty," he said. "What drives capital, particularly from a banking perspective, is trust." Large corporations get that trust because their books are professionally audited. Small businesses do not, so banks either refuse to lend or attach a risk premium that makes borrowing unaffordable.
His fix is a mindset shift, not a regulatory one. Every transaction a small business processes already tells a story, he argues, and that story is collateral. "If we see data as information that can generate insights, we can use it to make credit decisions," Dozie said. Examining cash flows and business data, he added, could in some cases produce lending decisions that are actually less risky than the brick-and-mortar collateral model banks have leaned on for decades.
The question now is whether Nigeria's broader banking sector is willing to follow where fintechs like Sparkle are pointing. Dozie clearly believes the tools are ready. The harder sell, it seems, is convincing the industry to trust what it cannot physically hold.
Originally published by TechCabal.