Kenyan and African businesses should move away from relying on intuition .[File, Standard]
Most companies still extend credit the way gamblers place bets. They see a familiar face, a fat order, a promise to pay in thirty days, and they release goods or money on faith. Then they spend the next six months chasing what they gave away in six minutes.
The businesses that will lead the next decade have already noticed the pattern. They are building the one capability their competitors still treat as a back-office cost: the ability to know, before money moves, who will pay and who will vanish.
Africa's problem has never been opportunity. Walk through any market in Nairobi, and you find more demand than the sellers can serve. Traders want stock they cannot fund. Lenders want borrowers they cannot read. What kills the business underneath is quiet: thin liquidity and credit systems never built to see risk coming.
Let me be precise about what credit intelligence is, because most people confuse it with a bureau report. A bureau tells you whether someone defaulted in the past. Useful, but it is a rear-view mirror. It cannot tell you why, or whether the customer in front of you today is sliding the same way.
Statements tell you what happened. Behaviour tells you why. Credit intelligence is the discipline of reading that behaviour and turning it into a decision you can defend.
Here is what should keep a founder awake. The signals already exist. They sit in mobile money flows, point-of-sale records, Sacco histories, and the rhythm of how a trader clears one invoice before opening the next.
Most businesses generate this data every day, use almost none of it, and make their most expensive decisions on gut feel anyway.