When small, instant loans of N5,000 to N10,000 first took off, Renmoney was one of the earliest digital lenders in Nigeria, offering quick, convenient credit to individuals and small businesses.
That was 10 years ago. Today, Renmoney is a fully licensed Microfinance Bank, still committed to making financial inclusion a reality for everyday Nigerians.
But as they grew over the years, providing affordable loans at scale came with new challenges. Their underwriting process started to crack — verifying users’ bank statements and accurately assessing potential borrowers manually became slow, unreliable, and difficult to scale.
The challenge of assessing borrowers’ creditworthiness
At the time, Renmoney relied heavily on user-provided statements and assessed borrowers manually. So if a user applies for a loan, their bank statements would have to be verified and analyzed before they could even be considered eligible for the requested loan amount.
“Prior to Mono, our creditworthiness assessment relied heavily on manual analysis of user-submitted bank statements, which was prone to errors, time-consuming, and also open to potential fraudulent activity,” says Oluwatosin Okunfulure, Product Manager at Renmoney.
Borrowers waited too long to be qualified, impacting loan decision rates, and the manual review of unverified statements often led to inaccurate customer profiling, increasing the risk of lending to people who couldn’t afford to repay.
Renmoney needed a way to collect authentic bank statements from their users and automate their creditworthiness process. That’s when they decided to use Mono.
Improving underwriting speed with Mono Statement Pages
With Mono Statement Pages, Renmoney could now collect users’ accurate statements directly from the bank without writing a single line of code. Instead of relying on user-submitted statements, they used Mono to automate the statement collection process, making the experience from loan application to disbursement faster and more seamless for their customers.
Tosan Akperi, Head of Risk Policy and Infrastructure at Renmoney, explains it: “Mono Statement Pages seamlessly automates the bank statement retrieval process, and by doing that, it gives our customers a frictionless experience when submitting those documents to us.”
“Also, its statement analysis capabilities allow for faster underwriting and decision making, and it eliminates the risk associated with handling physical documentation like user-submitted bank statements,” Tosan adds.
Now that Renmoney could pull customer bank statements in minutes, it meant that, they could verify customers’ income levels more accurately and confidently, and then use that data to make lending decisions on each loan application.
At the operational level, the ripple effect was clear: their credit-risk assessment process improved, fraudulent loan applications dropped, and loan decisions were made much faster.
“Ever since we partnered with Mono, we’ve seen great improvement in our process, which has also in turn reduced the risk associated with fraud, as well as better turnaround time,” says Oluwatosin.
The numbers were significant, too. They noticed:
70% increase in bank statement collection
30% reduction in underwriting turnaround time
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Powering an end-to-end lending process
With Mono APIs, Renmoney was able to streamline its entire lending flow, automating the experience from the first loan application to the last loan disbursed daily.
“Integration was seamless, as Mono has SDKs for all our platforms, which made it very easy for us. Callbacks, response time from these SDKs were also very impressive,” Oluwatosin says.
Beyond assessing borrowers’ capacity to repay loans, Renmoney also uses Mono Direct Debit to automatically collect these repayments when due, directly from customers’ bank accounts.
This works through direct debit mandates authorised by both the customer and their bank, allowing for fast, seamless, and reliable repayment collections.
Using various Mono solutions from acess to financial data to seamless variable recurring payments, Renmoney powered their lending operations at scale, enabling more secure and data-informed lending decisions.
If you’re a digital lender looking to build your lending stack with Mono and improve loan decision quality and repayment success rates, sign up to use Mono and check out our technical guides at mono.co/docs.
