Nigeria's banks closed 2025 with balance sheets that looked healthy by most conventional measures. Loan books grew. Profit after tax was strong. Net interest margins widened. On paper, lending was happening at scale.
SMEs, which make up over 90% of Nigeria's businesses and contribute nearly half of national GDP, received just 5% of commercial bank lending. The money was moving. It just was not moving toward the businesses that need it most. The Nigerian Voice
Across the WAEMU zone, the picture is structurally similar. According to World Bank Enterprise Surveys, 78% of SMEs in Côte d'Ivoire cite financing constraints as a major obstacle to their growth. IFC has had to build risk-sharing facilities with individual Ivorian banks just to make SME lending commercially viable enough for those banks to attempt it. As of early 2025, IFC announced three separate partnerships with SGCI, SIB, and Bridge Bank Côte d'Ivoire, covering a combined SME loan portfolio exposure of over $70 million — all requiring IFC to absorb 50% of the credit risk before the banks would move. That is not a lending problem. That is a risk infrastructure problem. International Finance CorporationInternational Finance Corporation
The reason lenders in both markets pull back from SME credit is not a lack of appetite. It is a visibility problem. A mid-tier MFB in Lagos or a commercial bank in Abidjan looking at an SME application sees fragmented data, no consolidated financial picture, and no structured asset to lend against. The credit committee cannot build a case that passes internal approval. So the capital sits elsewhere.
In Nigeria specifically, the end of CBN's COVID-era forbearance policy is now surfacing NPL ratios that were previously suppressed, with projections pointing toward 6–7% across the banking industry in 2025. The large-corporate and oil-and-gas exposures that drove record earnings are now showing stress. The portfolios that were easy to build are the ones creating problems. Nairametrics
This creates a real strategic question for lenders in both markets: where does sustainable credit growth actually come from?
SME asset-based financing is one credible answer — lending against verified receivables, purchase orders, or other business assets rather than credit scores or balance sheet collateral. The structure de-risks the loan at origination. The repayment source is defined. The exposure is bounded.
The reason most lenders have not moved aggressively on this is operational, not strategic. Running asset-based credit operations at volume requires document verification, asset validation, ongoing portfolio monitoring, and borrower management infrastructure that is expensive to build internally. For most institutions, the cost of the ops layer outweighs the margin on the loans.
What changes that equation is infrastructure that sits outside the lender's own system — one that handles deal origination, asset verification, credit assessment, and portfolio management, and delivers pre-qualified, structured deals to lenders who are ready to fund them.
Nigeria's 40 million MSMEs face a $236 billion funding gap. That number represents demand. The lenders who find a cost-efficient way to access it first are the ones who will build the SME portfolios that define the next decade of African credit. The question is not whether to enter the market. It is how to enter it without rebuilding your entire credit ops from scratch.