Guaranty Trust Bank (GTBank), one of Nigeria’s major banks, has introduced QuickCredit, a service that allows salary earners and self employed individuals to borrow up to N5 million and pay back over 6 – 12 months.
At a monthly interest rate of 1.75%, GTBank described QuickCredit as the service that offers the lowest interest rate in Nigeria.
“QuickCredit also offers one of the lowest turnaround times, where customers can get credit in their accounts within 2 minutes from the comfort of their homes. In addition, the bank does not require any collateral from customers to be eligible to apply for a QuickCredit loan,” the bank told TechCity.
There has been a lot of activities in Nigeria’s quick lending scheme with several startups innovating around the service but gaps still exist which GTBank’s QuickCredit is expected to fill.
“The creation of QuickCredit stems from a huge gap in the lending space and the growing need for easily accessible customer credit. QuickCredit was designed to offer instant, cheap, and readily available loans to individuals and small business owners.”
GTBank told TechCity
One of the shortcomings of borrowing from Nigerian banks are the collateral conditions and requirements. But GTBank said its QuickCredit service is collateral-free.
“The bank does not require any collateral from customers to be eligible to apply for a QuickCredit loan. GTBank has streamlined the process of pre-qualifying customers for QuickCredit, leaning on the benefits of our industry-leading data analytics solution to open up our digital lending platform to millions of customers, who traditionally have been excluded from such financial services,” the bank stated.
The bank described QuickCredit as the most popular consumer loan product in the country, adding real value to customers’ lives. It has also been one of the contributing factors to the bank’s loan performance, with the loan book growing by 1.6% from ₦1.262 trillion as at December 2018 to ₦1.282 trillion in March 2019.
GTBank told TechCity that the service is only available to GTBank customers who are salary earners or self-employed.
“They must also maintain a minimum monthly lodgement of N20,000 or earn a minimum net monthly salary of N10,000,” the bank said.
Against the public perception of loans being unavailable to startups and entrepreneurs, GTBank told TechCity that its array of loans are improving the performance of businesses in Nigeria.
“QuickCredit is one of many innovative products and services that enables us to achieve this, adding to our lineup of need-specific loan products such as Hub Credit, Travel Advance, Food and Fashion Industry Credit, etc. From QuickCredit’s industry leading interest rate of 1.75% to its low turnaround time, we are bringing value adding products to our customers at little or no cost,” the bank stated.
But it also admitted that a lot still needs to be done to improve access to loans in Nigeria, the most important being trust.
“The lending industry, while being a very sensitive one, must develop a higher level of trust between all parties involved, including financial service providers and customers, and especially for personal loans,” GTBank told TechCity.
