Causal credit scoring is here and is the future

This morning, a mama mboga needed Sh5,000 to restock. She tapped her phone, and 90 seconds later the money hit her M-Pesa. No logbook, no payslip, no guarantor. That same morning, a credit committee sat down to decide whether to release Sh2 million of stock to a distributor they'd supplied for three years.

They opened his audited accounts from 18 months ago, a bank reference, and a trade reference he'd chosen himself. Then they argued for an hour.

Look at those two decisions. The app lending 5,000 read 100 live signals about how that woman handles money. The committee vetting Sh2 million; read a story the customer curated about a version of himself that expired a year and a half ago. The small loan was the smarter one. That gap is where credit is going, and most corporates are on the wrong side of it.

A sharper question is winning. Not what you own, but what you do. The answer lives in behaviour.

The digital lenders built everything on that shift. Kenya now has more than 250 licensed digital credit providers, an industry that didn't exist 15 years ago.

By mid-2025, their loan book had passed the entire portfolio of the country's microfinance banks. Around eight million Kenyans, one in six, now lean on their phones for credit. They won by reading the present while banks audited the past.

Here's the part corporates must sit with. A digital lender studies how money moves through your M-Pesa and how faithfully you cleared the last loan.