NovaBridge Capital: SME Credit Transformation
CBN-Licensed Digital Lender | Lagos, Nigeria
NovaBridge was losing 67% of SME applicants before they even reached credit assessment. The few who made it through waited an average of 11.4 days for a decision, because underwriting ran entirely on spreadsheets, manual bureau lookups, and email queues. There was no automated compliance enforcement against CBN guidelines, and a single analyst maintained the credit scorecard in a version-controlled Excel file that no one else could audit.
Application Drop-off Rate
41% relative improvement
Time to Disbursement
76% faster end-to-end
Manual Underwriting Rate
78% reduction in referrals
SME Applicant NPS
225% improvement
What I Did
Led the full BA lifecycle across four workstreams for a 9-month programme redesigning how NovaBridge originated, scored, and disbursed SME loans.
Ran six weeks of structured discovery, including shadow sessions with credit analysts in Lagos to surface the undocumented heuristics sitting behind the Excel scorecard.
Mapped the AS-IS funnel by querying the application database directly in SQL, pinpointing that 44% of abandonment happened at the document upload step.
Designed the TO-BE origination journey from pre-qualification gate through to real-time NIBSS disbursement, reducing the application from 7 steps to 4 adaptive steps.
Specified nine API integration points including the Mono open banking connection, CBN-licensed three-bureau pull (CRC, CreditRegistry, FirstCentral), Smile Identity biometric check, and Finacle loan account creation.
Documented 14 credit decision rules in IF/THEN/ELSE logic, including the CBN affordability gate (DTI < 40%) and the three-bureau mandate, then got them approved through the Credit and Compliance Design Authority before sprint commitment.
Designed the AI-assisted underwriting layer for the manual review band, including the LLM output schema, feature attribution requirements, and override governance framework.
Coordinated a four-week UAT sprint across 87 test cases, managing defect triage in Jira and delivering the UAT Completion Report to the Steering Committee.