Key points
- Industry experts at the DBN Techpreneur Summit emphasized that AI can drive faster and more personalized credit assessments.
- PiggyVest Co-founder Odunayo Eweniyi stressed that AI systems reflect human ethics and require mechanisms for humans to appeal automated choices.
- She warned that human biases fed into machine learning algorithms will inevitably result in biased decision-making at scale.
- Credit Direct Limited CPO Nifemi Oluboyede stated that AI speeds up data point processing in real time without replacing human judgment.
- DBN Executive Director Ijeoma Ozulumba affirmed that technology-driven MSMEs remain critical to driving Nigeria’s broader economic growth.
Main Story
Artificial Intelligence (AI) holds the potential to continuously improve access to finance by enabling faster and highly personalized credit assessments, according to financial technology experts.
This perspective was championed during the Development Bank of Nigeria (DBN) Techpreneur Summit held in Lagos, under the central theme: “Innovate to Capital”.
Speaking at the interactive panel session, the Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of PiggyVest, Odunayo Eweniyi, maintained that AI will not stifle innovation if it is deployed responsibly and anchored on quality data registries. Eweniyi noted that AI systems strictly reflect the baseline quality of human choices and information used to train them.
She warned that if an individual’s innate decision-making is biased, feeding those flawed metrics into a machine will cause it to replicate biased decision-making at scale. Eweniyi linked ethical AI deployment to organizational values, arguing that individuals must retain the fundamental right to contest and appeal automated credit decisions, ensuring that a human fallback loop remains active.
Echoing these operational insights, the Chief Product Officer of Credit Direct Limited, Mr. Nifemi Oluboyede, stated that AI is actively boosting the speed and technical precision of credit evaluations. He noted that lenders can now evaluate multiple customer data points in real time to offer financial products tailored to individual user needs.
Oluboyede clarified that AI acts as an enhancement to existing credit assessment tracks rather than a complete replacement for human judgment, noting that the oversight of a human eyeball remains a necessity. Earlier, Mrs. Ijeoma Ozulumba, the Executive Director of Finance and Corporate Services at DBN, remarked that technology-driven Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) remain vital catalysts for Nigeria’s economic growth, pointing out the continuous expansion of the nation’s tech ecosystem across finance, climate solutions, and innovation-driven business sectors.
The Issues
- Mitigating the risk of algorithmic bias by ensuring high-quality, objective datasets are used to train financial AI systems.
- Implementing clear operational frameworks that allow everyday consumers to formally appeal credit decisions generated by automated platforms.
- Balancing real-time, high-speed automated data processing with the critical need for human oversight and judgment.
What’s Being Said
- Emphasizing the direct relationship between human data input and machine output, PiggyVest Co-founder Odunayo Eweniyi stated: “AI is only as good as the people training it. Tech exacerbates what you give to it. If your decision making was innately biased as a person, you feed that to a machine, it learns it and turns out biased decision making at scale,”.
- Advocating for consumer rights in automated lending, Eweniyi added: “Ordinarily, people should be able to contest a credit decision about them, whether or not AI made it. A human should be able to appeal, so when AI makes decisions, humans should still be able to appeal,”.
- Clarifying the role of automated algorithms in modern credit assessment, the Chief Product Officer of Credit Direct Limited, Mr. Nifemi Oluboyede noted: “What we’ve done with AI is to speed up that process more than it is replacing the human-centeredness around it. At the end of the day, there is definitely that need for that human eyeball,”.
What’s Next
- FinTech firms and digital lenders will continue refining their automated algorithms to improve real-time data point calculations.
- The Development Bank of Nigeria will expand its technical assistance and capacity-building tracks to support tech-driven MSMEs.
- Product designers will focus on integrating visible human-led appeal mechanisms within consumer-facing lending applications.
Bottom Line
While AI is transforming Nigerian fintech by processing customer data in real time for faster credit assessments, industry leaders at the DBN summit warn that automated systems must remain balanced by human oversight and ethical data training to avoid scaling systemic bias.
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