ABA Editorial · Jan 29, 2026 · 12 min read
The African SME credit gap is estimated at over USD 330 billion by the IFC. OmniRetail's OmniPay disburses USD 12 million monthly in BNPL inventory credit with NPLs below 0.5 percent. Pezesha raised USD 11 million in 2025. Float serves Ghanaian SMEs. Numida operates in Uganda. Inside the operators trying to solve what traditional banks cannot.
According to widely cited International Finance Corporation estimates, the African SME credit gap is over USD 330 billion, which is to say that is the approximate difference between the credit African small and medium-sized enterprises need to grow and the credit they actually receive from formal financial institutions. Every African economy that wants to move from informal to formal has to close some portion of this gap. Traditional banks have mostly given up trying. The task has fallen to a combination of embedded finance operators, specialist SME lenders, supply chain finance platforms, and development finance institutions that are willing to underwrite the smaller ticket sizes and alternative data profiles that commercial banks cannot. This is a market report on African SME lending and supply chain finance in 2026.
The structural reasons are consistent across markets. Loan underwriting at an African commercial bank typically costs the same whether the loan is for USD 5,000 or USD 500,000, because the compliance, KYC, credit analysis, and documentation workload is largely fixed. A USD 5,000 SME loan simply does not generate enough interest income to cover those costs at traditional bank operating ratios. Banks also face regulatory capital requirements that treat unsecured SME lending as high-risk, which forces them to hold more capital per unit of loan outstanding than they would for a mortgage or a large-corporate loan. The result is that banks concentrate their SME lending on the top tier of formal, collateralized borrowers and effectively exclude everything below that tier.
SMEs also have documentation gaps. Many operate with incomplete financial statements, no audited accounts, irregular tax filings, and business records that do not match bank underwriting templates. Even when an SME has the revenue to service a loan, demonstrating that revenue through the documentation a commercial bank requires is often impossible.
This is where embedded finance operators and alternative-data lenders step in. Their competitive advantage is that they already have the transaction data a commercial bank is missing.
OmniRetail, the Lagos-based B2B e-commerce platform covered in earlier batches, is the clearest example of the embedded SME finance model working at scale. OmniRetail's fintech engine, OmniPay, processed over NGN 1.3 trillion (approximately USD 810 million) in transactions in 2024 according to company disclosures. OmniPay disburses approximately USD 4 million in loans monthly, primarily in the form of buy-now-pay-later inventory credit to the small retailers who use the OmniBiz platform. The critical performance metric is the non-performing loan ratio: OmniPay maintains NPLs below 0.5 percent, an order of magnitude better than typical consumer lending.
The reason the NPL is so low is that OmniRetail is not lending to retailers in isolation. It is lending to retailers whose order history is visible on the OmniBiz platform, whose payment behavior can be observed in real time, whose next order is the mechanism by which the last order is repaid, and whose relationship with the platform gives OmniRetail the practical ability to suspend credit when needed. That visibility is the thing traditional banks cannot replicate. It is also the thing that makes embedded SME finance fundamentally different from standalone SME lending.
OmniRetail reached EBITDA positive status in 2023 and net profitable in 2024. The company now integrates with 13 financial service providers, connects 130 manufacturers (including Guinness, CHI, and Dufil Prima Foods) with 14 banks and logistics providers, and reaches over 150,000 small retail stores in Nigeria.
Pezesha, founded in 2017 in Nairobi by Hilda Moraa, offers a different take on the SME credit problem. Rather than being a B2B e-commerce platform that layers finance on top, Pezesha is a B2B lending infrastructure provider that enables any business platform (e-commerce operators, logistics platforms, gig economy apps) to offer working capital to the SMEs they already serve. Pezesha's pitch is "affordable working capital to financially excluded SMEs in Africa," and the company backs this with financial literacy courses and debt counselling for firms that do not qualify for loans.
In February 2025, Pezesha raised USD 11 million in a pre-Series A round consisting of USD 6 million in equity and USD 5 million in debt, led by Women's World Banking Capital Partners II. Other participants included Verdant Frontiers Fintech Fund, cFund, IOG, Talanton, and Verdant Capital Specialist Funds. The debt component is notable because it represents the capital Pezesha will on-lend to its SME customers, while the equity capitalizes the operating business itself. This hybrid capital structure has become the norm for specialist SME lenders who need both operating runway and lending capital simultaneously.
Beyond OmniRetail and Pezesha, several other SME lending and supply chain finance operators matter.
Float is a Ghanaian SME banking and credit platform that targets small businesses with integrated cash-flow management, invoicing, and working capital credit. Float has positioned itself as an "operating system for African SMEs" and has grown alongside the Ghanaian digital economy. Payhippo, founded in Nigeria, is a digital lender specifically targeting small merchants with short-term working capital loans delivered through WhatsApp and a simplified mobile application. Numida operates a similar model in Uganda.
Lidya, founded in Nigeria, offers working capital to SMEs with a credit-scoring model that uses transaction data rather than traditional collateral. Lidya expanded into European markets in 2019-2020, an unusual move for an African fintech but one that reflected the founders' view that the underwriting model would work outside Africa too.
TradeDepot and other B2B e-commerce operators continue to offer BNPL-style inventory credit to retailers through their platforms, though as covered in earlier batches, the model has worked better for operators who stayed asset-light and lending-focused than for those who built capital-intensive physical distribution first and tried to layer credit on later.
Supply chain finance is a specific subset of SME lending that focuses on financing the gap between when a supplier delivers goods and when the buyer pays for them. In a traditional corporate supply chain, a large buyer might pay its suppliers 60 or 90 days after delivery, which creates working capital pressure on the suppliers. Supply chain finance platforms provide short-term funding bridged against the receivable, letting the supplier get paid sooner and letting the buyer preserve its payment terms.
In the African context, this model has the potential to unlock significant SME working capital because it piggybacks on the creditworthiness of larger corporate buyers rather than requiring the SME to qualify on its own. Several African fintechs are experimenting with this approach, typically as a feature layered onto B2B commerce platforms. The technical infrastructure (verified invoices, confirmed delivery, predictable payment dates) is what makes supply chain finance underwriteable, and it is the same infrastructure that B2B e-commerce platforms like OmniRetail have already built.
Three things. First, whether OmniPay's sub-0.5 percent NPL performance holds through a Nigerian economic downturn. Most of the sector's impressive performance data was collected during relatively benign conditions. A sharp contraction in consumer demand would stress-test underwriting models in ways that have not yet been tested. Second, whether specialist SME lenders like Pezesha, Float, and Numida can raise the next round of funding needed to scale their loan books, given that venture capital has been cautious about lending businesses since the 2022-2023 reset. Third, whether supply chain finance embedded into B2B marketplaces becomes the dominant form of African SME credit, displacing the standalone digital lender model entirely.
The longer-term observation is that closing the USD 330 billion African SME credit gap will not happen through banks. It will happen through fintech operators who have built the operational and data infrastructure to underwrite credit at the scale and cost structure commercial banks cannot match. The companies that get this right are not glamorous consumer fintechs. They are back-office credit engines layered into the commerce, logistics, and payments infrastructure SMEs already use. The payoff is a slow, durable business. It is also the only business that actually addresses the problem at the scale the problem exists.
This report draws on IFC estimates of the African SME credit gap; TechCrunch reporting on OmniRetail's profitability and OmniPay metrics (March 2024 and April 2025); FinTech Futures coverage of the Pezesha USD 11 million pre-Series A round (February 2025); WeeTracker analysis of African B2B e-commerce financial services pivots (July 2025); and public materials from Float, Payhippo, Numida, and Lidya.