CRC Credit Bureau Data Rises to 15 Million

By Nume Ekeghe

One of the leading credit bureaux in Nigeria, CRC Credit Bureau disclosed that it has increased its credit files to 15,470,585 as at the end of February 2018.

This covered data from various sectors of the economy.

The firm also attributed the decline in non-performing loans (NPLs) in the banking sector to diligent credit data and improved risk management skills.

The Managing Director/Chief Executive of CRC Credit Bureau, Mr. Tunde Popoola, made this known at the CRC-RIMAN Risk roundtable held in Lagos recently.

He said that there had been loan growth in recent times as well as new products for SMEs, growth in consumer loans, increase in credit services from retailers banks as well as the introduction of SME desks in some banks as a result of worthy credit data in Nigeria.

On his company milestone, he said: “We currently have over 15million credit records in our repository and growing daily. Our customer base covers over 1000 institutions as at February 2018 from various sectors of the Nigerian economy.”

He further stated that these data where gotten from commercial banks, microfinance banks, primary mortgage institutions, merchant banks, other financial institutions, courier, cooperative societies, telcos, the discos, pharmaceutical companies, auto dealers, insurance, oil and gas, leasing and conglomerates sectors.

Speaking on challenges facing credit bureaux in Nigeria, he said that the high cost of operation was a major problem facing his sector.

He added: “Credit bureaux run with sophisticated and expensiveinformation technology infrastructure including credit bureau software, state of the art data analytics engines, communication/internet access, 24/7 availability resulting in high power and maintenance costs, full service disaster recovery infrastructure with complete software and hardware components, etc.

“To operate effectively, credit bureaus need economies of scale. The higher the volume of searches/queries conducted, the lower the transferred cost of service to lenders. Low volumes and low cost is not sustainable for the bureau industry to serve Nigerian lenders.”

Continuing, he said: “To buttress the extent of low data quality submission, it is pertinent to state that bank verification number (BVN)compliance stood at only 43.52 per cent and company registration number (RC number) compliance stood at 64 per cent as at December 2017.”

Also, the Partner, Financial Reporting Group at EY, Mr.  Jamiu Olakisan gave a holistic lecture on the challenges and what could go wrong on the recent adoption of the IFRS 9 reporting.

Olakisan said: “Classification and measurement not a big deal, lack of sufficient professionals with required skills, Knowledge gap on the part of the regulators and timing of commencement of IFRS 9 projects by Nigerian entities.

“Insufficient internal historical data required to support model building, lack of desired relationship between macroeconomic variables and losses, absence of sufficient forward looking macro-economic variables for to support modelling.”