Analytics of the supply side data to evaluate the progress and challenges of the digital credit sector in Kenya

• Apr 15, 2020
• 1 min

Given the rapid evolution of the digital credit landscape in Kenya, MSC conducted a research exercise to evaluate the progress and challenges in the sector. The study adopted various methods—secondary research, analytics of the supply-side data, demand-side qualitative research, and a mock application review. The final report of the study provided specific recommendations for the regulators, digital credit suppliers, and market facilitators to encourage a more responsible delivery of digital credit.

MSC was commissioned by the Social Performance Task Force (SPTF) and The Smart Campaign to develop a research report to understand the changes in the ecosystem of digital credit in Kenya. The study consolidated key findings from the analytics of supply-side data. The analytics was supplemented by insights from the demand-side qualitative research and secondary research. We also gathered customer insights like user experience with the product obtained through a mock-application review exercise.

We analyzed the data analytics used anonymized supply-side data from 14 suppliers including banks, MNO-linked banks, MFIs, and FinTechs that offer digital loans. The merged dataset contained 19 million loan details on 6.7 million unique borrowers. Our process generated results at the aggregate level to eliminate the possibility of having any insights interpreted differently.

The insights suggest that the number of digital loans issued has approximately doubled in the past two years. A few other key insights are as following:

Based on study findings, MSC’s recommendations ranged from data reporting and quality, customer protection, identity fraud, defaults of low-value loans to the loan pricing, and over-indebtedness of consumers, among others. Our team along with SPTF hosted webinars in English, Spanish and French to generate discussion on the key findings.