Get Guardian on GoogleIn Nigeria’s fast-growing financial technology space, one innovation is quietly rewriting the rules of lending and at the heart of it is Michael Akinyemi, Lead Software Developer at CreditClan.
Michael is the principal architect of the Bank Statement Analysis Portal, a platform that has effectively built Nigeria’s missing credit assessment infrastructure. In a country where no centralised credit rating system exists, his work is enabling lenders to assess loan applicants’ creditworthiness in seconds, a process that once took weeks.
Before this platform, Nigerian lenders faced a major bottleneck. Without credit bureaus to provide scores, the only reliable way to gauge financial behaviour was by reviewing applicants’ bank statements. This meant combing through physical or PDF statements manually, calculating income patterns, identifying irregular transactions, and building credit profiles from scratch.
“It was painfully slow,” Michael recalls. “Loan officers were spending two or three weeks just on bank statement analysis, and in that time, businesses could miss out on opportunities and individuals could face financial strain. I knew we could do better.”
Engineering a Game Changer
As the lead developer, Michael’s role was nothing short of transformative. He designed the adaptive parsing engine capable of reading and interpreting statements from 95% of Nigerian banks, each with its own format and security protocols.
“We wanted to build something that wasn’t just fast, but also accurate and scalable,” Michael explains. “The algorithms had to understand Nigeria’s banking diversity in different formats, different data structures and still produce consistent, reliable credit insights in under 30 seconds.”
He also created real-time processing algorithms that could extract patterns from transaction data, predict creditworthiness, and generate comprehensive reports all without relying on traditional credit scores.
Since its launch, the portal has processed over ₦100 Million in loan applications, cutting assessment time from weeks to seconds. Microfinance institutions, digital lenders, and traditional banks now use it to make fast, confident decisions.
“One lender told us they increased their loan portfolio by 300% in just six months,” Michael says with pride. “That’s not just numbers on a page, that’s real businesses growing, real people getting the capital they need.”
CreditClan’s CEO Femi Bejide puts it plainly: “We’re not just building software, we’re building the credit infrastructure Nigeria never had. Michael’s work has turned that vision into reality.”
Michael sees this as just the beginning. Plans are underway to expand the portal’s capabilities into a full-scale credit profiling system that could serve as Nigeria’s de facto credit bureau.
“Our vision is simple,” Michael says. “We want a future where access to credit isn’t limited by outdated systems or missing infrastructure. If we can make credit assessment more accurate and inclusive here, we can do it across other emerging markets too.”
In a fintech landscape full of bold ideas, Michael Akinyemi’s work stands out for its direct, measurable impact. By turning a tedious manual process into a lightning-fast digital service, he hasn’t just built a product; he’s reshaped the Nigerian lending ecosystem.
