MTN Nigeria processed 1.2B mobile money transactions in 2023. Safaricom’s M-Pesa now feeds 30M Kenyan credit profiles into NCBA Bank’s loan engine. Ghana’s Zeepay uses POS receipts to score 500K merchants monthly. These aren’t experiments. Equity Bank Kenya disbursed $1.8B in mobile-backed loans last year with default rates below 4%. The data is crude but abundant: airtime purchases, agent cash-ins, and nighttime top-ups now proxy for income stability.

FICO never worked here. Formal salaries cover 15% of adults. But Africa has 1.4B mobile connections and 300M+ active mobile money wallets. Banks are turning transactional exhaust into collateral. The shift is structural. Traditional loan officers cost 20% of revenue in Nigeria. Algorithmic underwriting cuts that to 2%. This isn’t inclusion as charity. It’s inclusion as arbitrage. The real risk isn’t default. It’s concentration. Telecoms control the data pipes and the lending rails. Safaricom’s M-Shwari now holds 25% of Kenya’s microloans.

MTN, Safaricom, and Airtel win as data landlords. Tier-2 banks like KCB and Equity gain share. Fintechs like Tala and Branch lose pricing power as incumbents weaponize data. Consumers win on access but pay 12-24% annualized rates. Regulators lose control as credit scoring moves from licensed bureaus to telco servers.

Watch for Kenya’s CBK forcing telcos to spin off credit bureaus. Expect Nigeria’s CBN to cap mobile loan rates after Flutterwave’s $3B valuation pressures fintech margins. Telecom lending books will hit $20B by 2025. Default spikes in one market will test cross-border data portability.