Digital Lending Suite: one door instead of five

In November 2025 Stanbic IBTC launched its Digital Lending Suite: every retail loan product the bank offers, brought behind one entry point inside Stanbic IBTC Mobile App 3.0. A customer who needs money opens the app, sees what they qualify for, applies, gets a decision, and receives the funds without speaking to anyone or entering a branch.

I was the project manager on the initiative, coordinating delivery across product, credit risk, engineering, compliance, and channel teams from scoping through go-live and into post-launch support.

The bank did not have a lending problem. It had a findability problem. Retail credit had been built product by product over years, each with its own journey, its own entry point, and its own partially manual steps. The result was a customer who had to understand the bank's internal product taxonomy before they could borrow from it.

• ›Retail loan products lived in separate journeys with separate entry points across channels
• ›Customers had to identify which product fit their need before they could find where to apply
• ›Applications that could not complete digitally fell back to branch visits and paperwork
• ›Every manual handoff between application and disbursement was a place to lose the customer
• ›Fragmented journeys made it hard to present terms consistently before commitment

• The journey had to complete in-appA suite that still ends in a branch visit is a menu, not a product. Application, credit assessment, decision, and disbursement all had to close inside Mobile App 3.0 for the consolidation to mean anything.
• Consolidation could not dilute credit disciplinePutting products behind one door does not merge their risk models. Each product kept its own assessment and approval criteria; the suite unified presentation and journey, not underwriting.
• Regulated consumer lendingConsumer credit disclosure, KYC, and CBN requirements applied to every product in the suite, and the single journey had to satisfy all of them without pushing the compliance burden onto the customer as extra screens.
• Built on the live retail channelMobile App 3.0 is the bank's primary customer surface. The suite had to land inside a running product used daily, with no regression to anything already there.
• Salaried, account-holding customers firstThe launch eligibility envelope was salaried customers with accounts domiciled at Stanbic IBTC, subject to credit assessment. Scope discipline at launch over reach.

A consolidation project is mostly a stakeholder project. Each product in the suite had an existing owner, an existing journey, and an existing view of how it should be presented; merging them into one shelf meant every one of those owners had to give something up.

Delivery ran across Personal and Private Banking as the sponsoring business, product management for the individual loan products, credit risk for assessment and approval criteria, engineering for the app and core banking integration, compliance and legal for disclosure, and the digital channels team who own Mobile App 3.0 as a living product. My role was to hold that group to one journey and one launch date.

Organise the shelf around the customer's need, not the bank's product structure. A customer does not arrive knowing whether they want an EZ Cash facility or an Unsecured Personal Loan; they arrive knowing how much they need and how long they need it for. The suite is built to answer in that order: amount and tenor first, product name second.

The second decision was to make terms visible before commitment. Fixed monthly interest, the repayment schedule, and the absence of both collateral and early-repayment penalties are shown up front, because a lending journey that hides its terms until the end is a journey customers abandon at the end.

As Olu Delano, Executive Director for Personal and Private Banking, put it at launch: integrating the loan offerings into a single digital platform improves access to credit while keeping the speed, security, and reliability customers already expect from the bank.

• product 01EZ CashImmediate, short-term financing from N50,000 to N10 million with tenors up to 24 months. Built for the moment a customer needs money now: application, decision, and disbursement complete inside the app.
• product 02Unsecured Personal Loan (UPL)The medium- to long-term option, carrying larger amounts across tenors up to 48 months, with a revolving facility that reopens once the customer has partially repaid. Aimed at personal projects and lifestyle goals rather than emergencies.
• product 03Additional consumer loan optionsThe remaining retail loan products join the same shelf, so the suite is a destination that grows rather than a two-product screen.

The split is deliberate. EZ Cash and the UPL are not competing products with overlapping ranges; they are the short horizon and the long horizon of the same need, and putting them side by side is what lets a customer self-select correctly in one screen.

• option 01Improve each loan journey in placeThe cheapest option and the one that changes nothing. Individually better journeys still leave the customer to work out which product they need and where it lives. The fragmentation was the problem, not the quality of any single journey.
• option 02Collapse the products into one flexible loanConceptually clean, operationally expensive. One product spanning N50,000 to the top of the UPL range across tenors from months to four years would need a single credit model to cover risk profiles that genuinely differ, and would have forced a rewrite of underwriting rather than a channel change.
• option 03One journey over a shared shelf, products intactThe chosen path. Keep each product's credit model and terms as they are; unify discovery, presentation, application, and disbursement into a single in-app journey. Delivers the customer benefit without touching the risk machinery underneath.

• A narrow launch envelope over broad reachLaunching to salaried customers with accounts already at the bank left out segments the suite could eventually serve. It also meant income verification and account history were already available, which is what allowed the journey to close in-app on day one rather than in a later phase.
• Unified presentation over unified underwritingThe suite looks like one product to the customer and remains several products to credit risk. That keeps the risk position defensible, at the cost of internal complexity that the journey has to hide convincingly at every step.
• Mobile app first over every channel at onceConcentrating the launch on Mobile App 3.0 delayed the same experience on other digital touchpoints. It also meant one surface to design, test, and support properly instead of several done thinly.
• No early repayment penaltyRemoving the penalty gives up fee income and makes interest revenue less predictable. It also removes the single most common reason customers distrust a digital loan product, which is worth more than the fee line.

1. 01. Product inventory and journey mappingMapped every existing retail loan journey end to end, including the manual steps that never appeared in any product document, to establish what consolidation actually had to absorb.
2. 02. Suite definition and scope lockAgreed with product and business which loans enter the suite at launch, which follow, and what the shared journey has to do for all of them. Scope lock happened early because it is the decision every later dependency hangs on.
3. 03. Credit and compliance alignmentWorked assessment criteria, disclosure requirements, and approval routing per product into a single journey design that satisfies each product's obligations without exposing that difference to the customer.
4. 04. Integration buildCoordinated engineering delivery across Mobile App 3.0, the loan origination path, decisioning, and core banking so application, decision, and disbursement complete in one session.
5. 05. Testing and dependency managementRan functional, integration, and user acceptance testing across products, and tracked the cross-team dependencies that consolidation creates by design: one late product blocks the shared shelf, not just itself.
6. 06. Launch and post-go-live supportTook the suite live in November 2025 alongside launch communications, and held the delivery group together through the first weeks of production behaviour.

Read as a single sequence, the suite is one uninterrupted path from need to funds. What makes it work is that every product-specific difference, credit model, approval routing, disclosure requirement, resolves behind the same eight steps.

1. Step 1Customer opens the lending section of Stanbic IBTC Mobile App 3.0 and sees every retail loan they are eligible for in one place
2. Step 2Suite presents the products side by side with amount, tenor, and monthly repayment stated up front
3. Step 3Customer selects a product and enters the amount and tenor they want
4. Step 4Repayment schedule and fixed monthly interest are shown before any commitment is made
5. Step 5Application is submitted in-app and passed to credit assessment
6. Step 6Decision returns to the customer inside the same session
7. Step 7Approved funds are disbursed to the customer's Stanbic IBTC account
8. Step 8Customer repays on schedule, or early with no penalty, and a UPL facility revolves back once partially repaid

The Digital Lending Suite went live in November 2025 as a single lending destination inside Stanbic IBTC Mobile App 3.0. Retail customers now reach every loan the bank offers them from one place, see the terms before they commit, and complete application, decisioning, and disbursement without leaving the app.

As Taiwo Ala, Head of Products, framed it publicly, the suite is a customer-centric innovation built to give Nigerians timely and flexible access to credit. The commercial case sits underneath that: a consolidated journey removes the drop-off points that fragmented lending had been quietly paying for.

Product parameters are as published at launch. Portfolio performance figures sit inside the bank and are not mine to publish.

• ›Consolidation is a stakeholder problem wearing a technical costume. The integration work was tractable; getting several product owners to accept one shared presentation of their product was the actual delivery risk, and it needed managing from week one rather than at design review.
• ›Unify the journey, not the risk model. Leaving each product's underwriting untouched is what made a single customer-facing shelf deliverable in one release instead of a multi-quarter credit programme.
• ›Shared shelves create shared critical paths. Once products launch together, the latest one sets the date for all of them, so dependency tracking has to be run at suite level, not per product.
• ›Terms up front is a conversion feature, not a compliance chore. Showing fixed interest, the repayment schedule, and the absence of penalties before application removes the hesitation that ends digital lending journeys one screen from the end.