Reading the wallet: why mobile money is the primary signal

When we audit a typical West African SMB credit application, we usually find a bank statement that opens with three months of low-frequency activity, a couple of standing orders, and very little else. To a Western credit model, this looks like a thin file. To a model trained on the same market, it looks like an almost-empty room with a door that leads somewhere else entirely.

The somewhere-else is the wallet. A baker in Thiès receiving XOF 480,000 per week from her clients via Wave is recording a complete, timestamped, counterparty-resolved revenue history. Her wallet logs her supplier payments, her power bills, her float. It is, in nearly every dimension that matters for credit, a richer document than her bank statement.

The methodological move is to stop treating the wallet as supplementary. We do not score the bank statement and then add a wallet bonus. We model both, with the wallet weighted by what it actually represents in the borrower's economic life — which, on this market, is most of it.