Starting From Zero
Ndewo is making credit history portable for Africa’s migrants
Hi there,
Welcome to the 48th edition of Next Capital, where we help you find Africa’s most promising startups, before they get big.
In our last edition, we wrote about the startup creating a credit score for informal/gig workers. If you missed it, you could catch up here 👇🏾
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Startup: Ndewo
Location: Manchester-based, for the Nigerian diaspora
Ask: Open to fundraising conversations, also seeking banking partners.
In 2024, roughly 52,000 Nigerians migrated to the United Kingdom, making Nigeria the second-largest source of non-EU migration after India.
The Nigerian diaspora in the UK has nearly doubled in four years, rising from 300,000 in 2021 to 550,000 in 2025, according to the British High Commissioner to Nigeria.
Many of these people arrive with strong salaries in their home country, professional qualifications, and years of responsible financial behaviour back home.
None of that matters when they walk into a UK bank.
Credit scores do not cross borders. A Nigerian who spent a decade repaying loans, managing credit cards, and building a financial track record becomes what the industry calls “credit invisible” the moment they land in London.
No UK credit history means no mortgage, no car finance, no phone contract, and sometimes no rental apartment. Experian estimates that roughly 5 million people in the UK are credit invisible, a category that disproportionately includes recent immigrants.
Research by cross-border credit bureau Nova Credit found that for 66% of working-age immigrants in the UK, receiving credit products takes longer than it should because of their lack of local history.
Over half say they have been treated differently by lenders for this reason. And yet, 65% start looking for a rental property within their first month of arrival, and 59% look for a credit card within three months. The demand is immediate. The system is not.
This is not a small or niche population. Nigerian diaspora remittances hit $20.93 billion in 2024, four times the country’s foreign direct investment for the same period and roughly 37% of all remittances flowing into Sub-Saharan Africa.
These are economically active people sending enormous sums of money across borders, but who cannot access basic financial products in their destination countries because their creditworthiness is locked in a system that does not talk to anyone else.
Next Capital spoke to Joshua Ojo, a former banker who spent about a decade at Guaranty Trust Bank across retail, commercial, and corporate banking before relocating to the UK.
When he arrived, he could not get a rental apartment because he had no UK credit history. He understood the mechanics perfectly, having spent years on the other side of lending decisions. He just had no way to prove any of that to a UK landlord or bank.
The idea sat idle for years while he and a co-founder explored the shape of the problem: siloed credit histories, a massive knowledge gap among consumers who do not understand how credit systems drive lending decisions, and the question of whether to serve banks directly or go consumer-first.
About two years ago, they committed. They called it Ndewo, the Igbo word for “welcome,” a name designed to resonate wherever they go.
A portable credit identity
Ndewo is building a platform that aggregates a user’s credit and financial data across countries into a single, cohesive profile that lenders in a new jurisdiction can actually read.
The core product pulls from credit bureaus and open banking data. In Nigeria, Ndewo has partnerships with credit bureaus and with Mono for financial data access.
In the UK, the company has signed agreements with Equifax for credit data and a provider for open banking data. The goal is to stitch together a continuous financial history: if you lived in Nigeria for five years, moved to the UK for three, and are now relocating to Kenya, Ndewo wants a bank in Nairobi to see one unified record, not three fragmented ones.
On the consumer side, the Ndewo app lets Nigerian users check their credit history, link bank accounts for spending analysis, and interact with an AI financial advisor. A new version of the app with MixPanel analytics launched recently on Android, with iOS in review. The near-term roadmap includes an AI tax advisor that generates LIRS filing documents from linked financial data, a lightweight extension given Ndewo already holds the underlying transaction data.
On the B2B side, the company has built a platform for banks that consolidates diaspora customer data. A pilot with Optimus Bank is complete. Testing conversations with Ecobank are underway. Several microfinance institutions that participated in the CBN’s diaspora lending initiative have also expressed interest.
The company has completed NDPC certification and ISO 27001 for data compliance, a deliberate early investment given the sensitivity of financial data.
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Money Talk
Ndewo’s revenue comes from three places.
First, consumer subscriptions in Nigeria, likely priced around 1,000 to 1,500 naira monthly, with premium features like tax filing used as conversion levers.
Second, referral commissions from bank partnerships. In the UK, the team is already earning from mortgage introductions, taking 25% of the broker’s commission per successful deal. Joshua noted the last completed transaction nearly doubled the average case value of £18,000.
Third, the B2B bank platform, which positions Ndewo as the data layer between diaspora customers and the financial institutions trying to serve them.
The previous version of the app had about 1,000 users. Current active users sit around 500 on the legacy app, with a target of 10,000 in the coming months as the new version rolls out alongside PR and marketing.
The team is seven people. Joshua leads business and partnerships. His co-founder, a second-time founder who previously co-founded a Google Health venture, serves as CTO and product lead. Design and development are handled entirely in-house.
The Big Picture
The timing here is interesting. Nova Credit, a US-based cross-border credit bureau that has raised $150 million in venture funding, already offers credit passport services through partners like HSBC and Scotiabank. But Nova Credit works primarily through major institutions in developed markets, and its Africa coverage is thin.
The problem Ndewo is solving from the African end, where credit bureau infrastructure is fragmented and consumer education is low, looks meaningfully different from translating an American Experian file into a UK-readable format.
Ndewo’s biggest bottleneck is regulatory.
The FCA authorization process in the UK is the gate to activating the cross-border credit product at its full potential. Without it, the company cannot access UK open banking data at scale.
That milestone unlocks the diaspora mortgage revenue, the bank partnerships, and the core value proposition. Until then, the Nigerian consumer product is holding the fort.
The risks are clear. Ndewo is early: 500 active users, seven people, and a regulatory dependency that is outside the team’s control.
Convincing banks to integrate with a startup for credit decisioning is a long sales cycle. And building cross-border data infrastructure across jurisdictions with different privacy regimes, different credit bureau standards, and different regulatory bodies is an operational challenge that scales in complexity, not just cost.
But the structural case is hard to argue with. The Nigerian diaspora sends over $20 billion home every year. Hundreds of thousands of Nigerians move to new countries annually. And the financial system that is supposed to serve them still treats every border crossing as a hard reset.
If Ndewo can crack FCA authorization and prove the bank integration model works, it becomes the credit layer for Africa’s globally mobile population. That is a big if. But it is also a big market.
Do you think Ndewo can make your credit history follow you across borders?
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Until next week! 🫡
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