Personal Equity: Quantifying Individual Activity to Price Risk

Nigeria's credit system, long reliant on data held by individual lenders, is fundamentally incomplete. This "institutional insularity" means borrowers who demonstrate consistent financial responsibility across various institutions are often undervalued. Their positive repayment history with one lender, savings through a fintech wallet, or timely payments on a buy-now-pay-later service remain invisible to other potential creditors. Consequently, individuals may face higher interest rates or be denied credit, not due to actual risk, but because their comprehensive financial behavior is unmeasured.

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Personal Equity is the quantified expression of an individual’s financial behaviour, aggregated across every institution with which they have transacted and translated into a precise, portable measure of creditworthiness.

The Credit Reporting Act of 2017 and the Central Bank of Nigeria's licensing framework aimed to address this by establishing credit bureaus. However, the system suffers from selective compliance. Lenders are more inclined to report negative data than positive behavioral patterns. Furthermore, institutions that have cultivated detailed customer profiles are reluctant to share this information with competitors. This dynamic leaves borrowers in a precarious position, their financial discipline poorly reflected and their creditworthiness underestimated.

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It is, in essence, a person’s credit identity, not as a single lender perceives it, but as the full breadth of their financial life reflects it.

The Nigeria Data Protection Act of 2023 asserts that personal data, including financial behavior, belongs to the individual. Institutions act as processors, not owners, of this data, which is generated by the individual's conduct. Personal Equity aims to operationalize this principle, transforming an individual's data into a portable and commercially valuable asset. Mathesis Analytics has built a platform that integrates with core banking systems to continuously update individual profiles and scores. Their approach aggregates signals from multiple financial relationships and enriches them with alternative data, such as telco usage and utility payments, to capture the financial character of underbanked and thin-file individuals. To date, Mathesis has scored over 40 million Nigerians, facilitating more than $272 million in credit disbursements.

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A borrower who faithfully repays a microfinance loan, consistently saves through a fintech wallet, and services a BNPL facility without default has demonstrated coherent financial responsibility. Yet under Nigeria’s prevailing infrastructure, that pattern is invisible to any lender they have not yet transacted with.