Notes

Navigating Cross-Border Credit Operations

Where fragmentation hides risk, and resilience starts with visibility

Slyt HQ

26 May 2025

Share:

𝕏in

Cross-border credit operations are a mess, but no one really talks about it.

They don’t break because the models are wrong. They break because execution happens across currencies, regulations, time zones, languages, and legal systems—and none of the internal systems were designed to absorb that complexity.

A portfolio that looks clean on Monday morning in Casablanca may be materially riskier by Thursday afternoon in Abidjan. That risk is rarely visible. Often, it isn’t even logged.

African credit institutions—whether banks in West Africa or fintech originators in Nairobi—are particularly exposed. Many of them operate across jurisdictions with different credit bureaus, divergent collateral enforcement norms, and highly volatile FX regimes. But their infrastructure is still optimised for local lending.

They rely on slow-moving reporting cycles, static data files, and middle-office workflows built for a single sovereign framework. Cross-border exposure? That’s handled in spreadsheets, flagged manually, and often only during a quarterly review. It’s no wonder risk gets missed.

The truth is: a cross-border loan book needs different tooling than a domestic one. It needs real-time ingestion from distributed systems. It needs governance logic that maps to each jurisdiction’s risk rules. It needs alerting and exception handling that understands that the borrower in Ghana isn’t just another row in the same table as the one in Tunisia.

This isn’t about “digitising” loan management. It’s about building credit systems that understand cross-border context natively.

So far, most vendors haven’t. They build generic dashboards, and leave the edge cases—i.e., everything that matters—to the client.

There’s an opportunity here. As African credit markets deepen and more cross-border funds flow into local originators, institutions will need to get sharper. Risk won’t come from modeling errors—it will come from the operational blind spots they never instrumented.

We think the winners in African credit will be the ones who take operational visibility seriously—not just at the loan level, but at the systems level. It won’t be enough to be compliant. You’ll need to be aware.

That’s the real work ahead. It’s not glamorous. It’s foundational.