Branch Prime: Scaling High-Limit Lending in Nigeria

Branch Prime was introduced as a premium, high-limit loan product designed to reward our top-tier borrowers. This product is expected to be rolled out to 20% of these borrowers to limit risk and exposure. However, the initial rollout was heavily bottlenecked by systemic technical debt that stalled rollout at 5% and affected disbursements negatively.

The Breaking Point: In Nigeria, the requirement to verify users' Financial Accounts (FAs) before retrieving their bank statements led to a massive drop-off and stalled conversion rates.

The Blind Spot: There was a deep-rooted legacy bug in the Financial Account (FA) validation process, which restricted the automated assignment pool, stalling initial assignment rates at 5% and severely impacting monthly disbursement targets.

The Risk: Users were blocked due to the FA validation failures, leading to users opting for low loan limits, user frustration and degrading customer trust.

As the sole PM managing lending for Nigeria, I had to align KYC and Payments Engineering teams to diagnose these bottlenecks:

Engineering (KYC & Payments): Needed a way to refactor the Bank KYC Transform to properly validate and clean up stale accounts without breaking downstream payment and lending systems.

The Borrowers: Needed a seamless, zero-friction path from eligibility to disbursement, ensuring their most recent financial data was used for credit scoring.