Regxta Global Services Limited, a Lagos-based financial services company, is strengthening its agent-led lending model by combining field distribution with technology to improve borrower monitoring, repayment tracking and loan portfolio management.
The development comes as lenders serving micro-business owners and informal-sector borrowers increasingly adopt digital tools while retaining human support for customers who may need assistance accessing credit.
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Regxta began lending in 2018 as The Bells Dynamic Option before rebranding in 2021.
Field agents were central to the company’s operations, helping register customers, process applications and follow up on repayments.
As the business expanded, however, much of the process remained manual, making it increasingly difficult to maintain visibility over individual loan portfolios and identify repayment problems early.
The company subsequently began developing a central lending platform to bring more of its field operations into a single system.
Moses Obika, who joined Regxta as a contract engineer in August 2021 and became Chief Technology Officer in September 2022, was involved in developing the technology.
“I started on contract, fixing whatever was broken that week,” Obika said. “That’s how I learned the business: what agents actually do in the field and where money actually gets lost.”
The platform went live in October 2023 alongside an application built specifically for Regxta’s field agents.
Through the application, agents can register customers, collect business information, capture photographs, support identity verification and submit loan applications.
The system also alerts agents when borrowers in their portfolios begin falling behind on repayments.
The technology has allowed Regxta to monitor both borrower activity and the performance of the agents responsible for individual loan portfolios.
That distinction has become particularly important because agents remain central to the company’s distribution model.
Regxta said about 40 per cent of its customers own smartphones, although many still require assistance to complete the lending process.
Rather than replacing field agents with digital systems, the company has used technology to make their activities more visible and their portfolios easier to manage.
“The biggest lever wasn’t scoring the customer,” Obika said. “It was scoring the agent. Once your ability to lend depended on the health of your own book, behaviour changed faster than any model could have managed.”
Regxta subsequently linked an agent’s ability to facilitate new loans to the performance of loans already within the agent’s portfolio.
Agents whose customers accumulated defaults could have their ability to originate additional loans restricted until the performance of their existing portfolios improved.
The first implementation in 2024 was later withdrawn after several weeks, with Obika acknowledging that the controls were not strong enough to influence behaviour and that resistance from agents had been underestimated.
“The first version was too loose to change anything, and we underestimated the pushback,” he said. “When we came back to it, we made it strict and made it clear: your book is your reputation.”
The policy was reintroduced in 2025 with stronger enforcement.
Loan monitoring also became more responsive.
Under the earlier manual system, repayment difficulties could go unnoticed until an agent contacted a borrower directly.
The digital platform now tracks repayments and alerts the responsible agent when a customer begins falling behind, giving the agent an opportunity to intervene earlier.
“Before the alerts, an agent might find out a customer was struggling weeks after it started,” Obika said. “Now they know within days, while a visit and a conversation can still fix it.”
According to Regxta, the platform has processed more than 100,000 loans since its launch and currently handles more than 4,000 loans each month.
The growing volume has increased the importance of monitoring not only individual borrowers but also how effectively agents manage the portfolios assigned to them.
The model reflects a broader shift in financial services, where technology is increasingly being used to improve visibility and accountability without removing the human relationships that remain important to underserved customers.
For Regxta, the agent remains an important part of the lending process.
Technology is instead being used to provide earlier information, improve oversight and connect new lending decisions to the performance of existing portfolios.
The company is now developing a second version of its platform as it considers expansion into additional regions and explores opportunities to make parts of the technology available to other lenders serving similar customer segments.
“Our customers have been proving they’re creditworthy for years, one repayment at a time,” Obika said. “Version 2 is about taking what we’ve learned to more places, letting other lenders build on it, and making sure the underserved aren’t invisible to the credit system anymore.”
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Regxta’s experience points to a potentially important role for technology in expanding access to credit while maintaining the field relationships that help lenders understand and support customers operating outside traditional financial channels.
