John lost his banking job during the coronavirus pandemic. The pandemic was unexpected and caught almost everyone unaware. Five months into unemployment, John is now completely broke. He is desperate and decides to request a loan to assist him. There is an issue: he requested a loan from five different lenders, and all got approved. Time for payback, and John can only pay two lenders back, defaulting on the rest. This situation, with John borrowing loans from multiple lenders and defaulting on some, is what Yutars is trying to prevent. How? By providing John's credit data to lenders.
Yutars wants to revolutionize the credit data sharing space, sharing credit data with users or customers.
Speaking with co-founders John Agwu(CEO) and Wale Ayandiran(CTO), the journey for them began when they discovered some problems in the credit data sharing space. For instance, there is currently no way to be aware of a loan applicant’s recent level of credit exposure in real time. That is, there is no way to know if a potential borrower already has loans to pay back to other lenders. This is particularly very important in this digital age. There is a rising number of digital lenders in Nigeria giving loans to borrowers in no time. This makes it easy for borrowers to get loans from different lenders simultaneously, raising the possibility of borrowers defaulting on most loans.
Even worse, due to the current economic challenges, which seem like they will continue to worsen, loan default rates are increasing. Loss of jobs, government policies affecting people’s livelihoods, coronavirus, and lockdowns are making it really difficult for people to cope. As a result, they are looking for ways to get money to meet their needs. Enter loans to help them, and many of them, unfortunately, lack the capacity to pay back.
We spoke with the CTO, Wale Ayandiran, who spearheaded the development of Yutars’ architecture, designed to aggregate and analyze credit data securely. The platform has:
Onboarded 12+ credit lenders, including major digital lenders and microfinance institutions
Processed over 500,000 credit applications in 18 months, with an estimated worth of $9.3 million in financial data
Reduced default risks by 40% for partnered lenders through real-time exposure alerts
Yutars’s engineering team also built tools for non-tech lenders, such as SMS-based integration and simplified dashboards, ensuring even informal institutions could participate. “Our goal was inclusivity,” Wale notes. “We didn’t want infrastructure gaps to exclude smaller lenders from the ecosystem.”
This is what Yutars aims to solve. The company wants to help African lenders know in real time about every loan request a borrower has made so that they won't have to simultaneously fund a borrower beyond the borrower's capacity to pay back. But it does not stop at helping lenders alone. The startup also wants to educate borrowers and provide tools that help them effectively manage their personal finances.
The startup currently has four employees, two of whom have domain knowledge and the remaining two are software engineers with proven track records.
According to John Agwu, “We want to approach the problem dynamically, addressing different specific niches of lenders.”
At the moment, there is a beta version for lenders giving loans to Federal Government of Nigeria workers with IPPIS. Here's the beta link: https://yutars.com//
To clarify, Yutars is not just a lending tool. The startup offers borrowers a free financial literacy application, including debt management, repayment calculators, and reminder alerts. “Overborrowing often stems from desperation, not recklessness,” says John Agwu. “By empowering borrowers with knowledge and tools to manage their debt, we’re fostering responsible credit behavior.”
