While closing Nigeria’s SME credit gap, Nombank clocks ₦250 billion in monthly transactions

Nombank says its daily transaction volume has grown from ₦7 billion in May 2025 to roughly ₦250 billion in May 2026. That claimed jump sits at the centre of how Seun Osunkeye, the bank’s managing director, describes what Nombank is trying to build inside one of Nigeria’s fastest-growing payments companies.

Nomba acquired a microfinance bank licence and rebranded it as Nombank, creating a regulated entity that now sits underneath Nomba’s merchant network.

Nomba handles the distribution and the tech, the POS hardware, the merchant software, and the transactional rails that millions of Nigerian businesses touch daily. Nombank handles the money itself, mobilising deposits and extending credit as the CBN-licensed entity authorised to do so.

When a merchant saves through the app or draws a loan, the funds sit with Nombank rather than Nomba. Osunkeye argues the distinction matters because a regulated bank carries obligations around capital adequacy and deposit insurance that a standard payments processor never has to meet, and as the deposit base grows, that oversight becomes the thing stakeholders need to understand.

Osunkeye’s path to the role runs through an undergraduate thesis on how microfinance institutions support small business survival, finance roles at HotelOga and NightsBridge, a stint co-founding Carnegie Venture Partners, and several years at Nomba itself, first as senior finance associate and later as financial controller.

That last role put him inside the company’s treasury and planning functions long before he ran the bank, watching closely what it actually cost to serve a merchant and where the unit economics held up under pressure.

He is an ICAN-certified accountant, and he traces his approach to running Nombank directly to that training: most banking executives rise through credit or relationship management and learn to read a balance sheet, while his instinct runs toward risk and controls first, ahead of strategy or narrative.

The Nombank case for a data advantage

Osunkeye frames Nombank’s edge as informational rather than regulatory. A microfinance licence has become close to a commodity among Nigerian fintechs chasing the same authorisation (Paystack, Moniepoint, and OPay among them), but Osunkeye pushes back on the idea that these moves are interchangeable.

Nombank, he says, has operated as the banking layer behind Nomba for three to four years already, building a live, transacting customer base before regulators and competitors caught up to the trend. The volume flowing through that base, on Osunkeye’s account, gives the fintech a granular read on liquidity patterns and seasonal cash flow swings that conventional banks and credit bureaus simply cannot see.

And that data shapes how the bank prices and structures credit in ways a traditional MFB built on multi-year audited statements and physical collateral cannot easily replicate.

That model extends beyond Nombank’s direct merchant base into embedded finance. Osunkeye points to an oil and gas tech partner operating in Nigeria’s midstream sector, connecting suppliers to fuel stations across a fragmented supply chain.

Seun Osunkeye of Nombank

Nombank has embedded virtual account collections directly into that partner’s platform, letting fuel stations settle transactions without leaving the system they already use. Because Nombank can see the transaction behaviour moving through that network, it can extend credit during operational downtime that would typically scare off a conventional lender.

Osunkeye describes this as a repeatable model across sectors such as logistics and remittances, where a business already close to its customers wants to offer savings or credit without becoming a bank itself.

Where the gap still runs deep

Even with that infrastructure improving, Osunkeye says Nigeria’s underlying SME credit gap remains the harder problem.

Much of the country’s fintech-led microfinance sector still functions mainly as a deposit-mobilisation channel, he argues, while the more difficult work, building credit products that actually perform at scale for underserved businesses, requires the kind of granular data and risk discipline that not every institution in the market has built yet.

He describes leading Nombank inside a company on a unicorn trajectory as a balance between speed and constraint: decisions that might take a legacy bank a quarter now happen in days, but a licenced institution holding public deposits cannot treat that speed as licence to experiment.

His read is that the ambition driving Nomba’s wider growth and the discipline required to run a bank are not in tension, and that his job is to make sure Nombank’s structure can hold as the rest of the group scales around it.