Iya Bose Was Already The Underwriter
The real innovation wasn’t the app. It was the balance sheet
Iya Bose (“Bose’s Mum,” the standard way an older market woman is addressed, using her child’s name) has run a grains stall at Mile 12 for close to two decades. She knows which retailers pay on collection day and which ones need three days’ grace before a bad week turns into a bad month. She knows this the way a person knows a family member’s moods, not from a spreadsheet, from watching. When a retailer’s order slows down two weeks before Ramadan, she already knows why. She already knows whether to extend credit anyway, and how much.
No fintech founder built her that judgment. She built it herself, transaction by transaction, over years nobody else was tracking.
The founders who eventually made money in Nigeria’s payments boom didn’t replace Iya Bose. They built underneath her. First a POS terminal, then a settlement account, then eventually a credit line, the payment and settlement pipes, the “rails,” that sit underneath a transaction once it’s agreed, rather than anything to do with deciding who gets credit in the first place. She kept doing exactly what she was already doing, just faster, and with someone else’s balance sheet behind her instead of her own memory alone. The founders who tried the opposite move, going around her straight to her retailers, mostly spent eighteen months rebuilding a version of the trust she already had. Badly, and at their own expense.
I first saw the shape of this argument somewhere other than my own notebook, a sharp, specific observation on a timeline about why the trader down the road trusts the person collecting her daily contribution more than she’ll ever trust an app. I went looking for it again while writing this and couldn’t find it. What follows is my attempt to work out why it was right.
The Trust Radius
Every pitch deck that quotes “40%-plus of Nigeria’s GDP is informal” treats that number as a gap, an unbanked population waiting for the right app. Buried inside that framing is an assumption nobody says out loud. That the informal economy is informal because nobody has built anything for it yet.
The informal economy already runs on infrastructure: Iya Bose’s memory, and a hundred thousand people like her, each holding a working credit model inside a relationship instead of inside software.
Ask what any lender needs to underwrite a loan. A reliable read on cash flow, and some way to make sure the money comes back. Iya Bose has both, and her version updates faster than any bank’s. She watches a retailer’s order size drop before a risk model in a Lagos head office would ever see it. What she doesn’t have is a way to turn that knowledge into capital at the scale her retailers need. That was always the real gap, and it sits in the pipes underneath trust that already existed — not in the product on top of it.
None of this works if the person holding the trust has a reason to resist formalizing her role instead of joining it. So name the incentive directly rather than assume she’ll cooperate. Take the alajo collector, the person who has for generations walked Yoruba markets daily gathering contributions into a rotating savings pool. She has always earned a fee for that exact function, standard practice puts it at roughly one day’s contribution per thirty-day cycle, around 3.3%. It’s a paid role already, just an informal one, and it’s also a role with real exposure. Lagos courts have prosecuted collectors over fraudulent thrift cards, and every market has a story about one who vanished with a month’s contributions. LibertyPay and a few others now hand the collector a small POS terminal, and contributions move through it directly instead of through her hands, whether by card, transfer, or USSD, which removes the thing that actually creates the risk: cash sitting with one person between collection and payout. The same shift shows up even without a fintech company involved. Plenty of ajo groups now run over WhatsApp, contributions by transfer instead of cash-in-hand, with someone in the group still doing exactly what the alajo always did: tracking who’s paid, chasing stragglers, deciding when the pot moves. Where that person gets removed entirely, in the fully automated version of digital ajo with no organizer at all, participation and trust both tend to suffer. She’s the reason the system works. Nobody is asking her to give up the thing that matters to her position. She is still the one whose word decides who’s good for it. Formalize the fee that already exists. Don’t touch the judgment that earns it.
Where founders get burned is the opposite move, trying to reach her customers directly and cut her out. It’s the more expensive path every time someone’s tried it, because you’re not just building a product. You’re rebuilding, from zero, twenty years of memory someone else already had for free.
A claim this clean should worry you a little. If “trust conversion, not digital adoption, is the binding constraint” can explain every outcome after the fact, it isn’t an argument. It’s a horoscope. So ask what would break it, and whether anything already has.
Moniepoint’s own numbers hand over the answer. Through 2025 the company built a book that, by its own account, ran to over ₦1 trillion in credit to roughly 70,000 businesses, an average loan size of about ₦14.3 million, and borrowers who kept up repayments showed an average 36% jump in transaction value afterward. That’s the trust-radius model working as described: short tenors, repayment tied directly to daily POS data, underwriting that’s really just formalized memory of cash flow.
Then look at where it didn’t hold. By early 2026 the same institution was carrying close to ₦7 billion in non-performing loans, concentrated in two facilities that looked nothing like the model above. A ₦5 billion working-capital loan to Alerzo and a ₦2.4 billion facility to the ShopRite Nigeria franchise, both written with corporate-style, multi-month tenors instead of the daily-repayment structure tied to transaction data. Both went bad. ShopRite’s stores shut down entirely.
It’s the boundary condition — and a useful one. The pattern holds where credit is priced against a trust-holder’s daily, observed cash flow, and it stops holding the moment a lender extends the same logic to a borrower who was never inside that trust radius, meaning the specific stretch of relationships whose day-to-day risk someone can actually judge from having watched it. A large corporate account underwritten like a bank loan sits outside that radius even when the same institution is writing the check. And a founder building an app-first product in a category with no Iya Bose yet to formalize sits outside this claim entirely too. This is narrower than “digital-first always loses,” and being narrower is what makes it testable.
Where EETAM Stops
EETAM does one job well. It tells you how big a market really is once you strip out the four things founders love to skip, how much of that population is economically active, how many can be reached digitally, how many can afford the product, how often they’d realistically use it. Run those filters on a claim like “Nigeria’s informal SME credit gap is a $30 billion opportunity,” at 45% economic activity, 55% digital reach, 60% affordability, and 70% frequency, multiplied rather than added since a business that fails even one test isn’t addressable at all, and that collapses to roughly $3.1 billion. That’s the number that should anchor a term sheet, not the headline.
EETAM was never built to answer why the market stayed unaddressed once it’s been sized correctly. For Iya Bose’s segment, the four filters above already point to yes: she’s economically active, reachable, able to pay, transacting constantly, in cash, at high frequency. None of that was ever the binding constraint. The constraint sits one layer beneath the sizing math entirely, in whether a lender can turn what Iya Bose already knows into a number a risk model will accept. Call it trust conversion. EETAM tells you the market is real. It doesn’t tell you why the market stayed unaddressed anyway, and that second question is the one this piece is answering, because a founder who runs the EETAM math correctly and still ships an app-first onboarding flow has solved the wrong variable precisely.
There’s a second-order effect worth stating, because it’s the part that makes this more than a story about one trader. Give Iya Bose working capital and she doesn’t just hold it. She buys more stock. And because she already extends short-term credit to her own retail customers, on exactly the same trust logic a lender is now extending to her, that capital moves one more step down the chain without anyone underwriting it twice. Her retailers get more room to restock. Their customers see fuller shelves. One loan, priced against one trust-holder’s judgment, re-lends itself through relationships that already existed and cost the lender nothing extra to reach. That’s a different kind of return than a single-borrower loan produces. The same naira turns over more times, at more points in the chain, before it leaves the market. It’s also the real efficiency case for funding the person who already holds the trust rather than trying to underwrite every trader beneath her one loan at a time. You reach the whole chain by pricing the node at the top of it correctly, once.
The founders who win the next wave in Nigeria’s informal economy will be the ones who can name, specifically, who already holds the trust in a given trade, a super-agent, a market association head, an alajo collector, and who build settlement and credit rails for that person to run ten times their current volume without asking them to change how they work. This also flips who the real competitive risk is. It’s the well-capitalized founder who tries to disintermediate Iya Bose, fails, and spends eighteen months rebuilding, from a standing start, the one asset that took her two decades to earn and can’t be shortcut with funding.
The Position
Sizing a market correctly answers one question. Whether that market can actually be reached is a separate one, and in large parts of Nigeria’s informal economy, that second answer was never digital adoption. The boundary case shows exactly where it stops being true, the moment credit gets written against someone who was never inside the trust radius to begin with. Everyone who has made real money underwriting the informal economy so far did it by finding the person the market already trusted, and building underneath her.
For anyone underwriting a bet in this space rather than building one, the diligence question is the same one, asked in reverse. Don’t start with whether the product is good. Ask who already holds the trust in that specific transaction, whether the model is priced against that person’s daily, observed behavior or against something one step removed from it, and what happens to repayment the moment that distance grows. Run the Alerzo and ShopRite loans through that question and they fail it before a single naira goes out the door, which is exactly the diagnostic value of asking it first instead of after the write-off.
The next founder chasing a piece of that opportunity should stop asking what app the market needs. They should go find their own Iya Bose, sit with her for a week, and ask who she already trusts to hold money on her behalf. Build for that person. Everyone else is still knocking on the wrong door.