Digital Lending and the Challenges of Data Protection in Nigeria’s Financial Sector

Abstract

A healthy financial services sector remains critical for the sustenance of social and economic development of any nation, as it guarantees easy access to finance for developmental purposes. One of such ways of accessing finance is through lending from financial institutions, which are mainly the conventional banks, but the tide is now changing owing to the disruptive effect of Covid-19 pandemic. There became the need to leverage on innovative technology in the Nigerian financial sector to rapidly move from the analog-based financial services to a technologically driven financial sector where services are rendered faster, easier and more accessible to the overall benefit of customers, investors, businessmen and other stakeholders. The advent of Covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent lock downs during the period further exposed the vulnerability of the Nigerian financial sector as access to funding became a challenge to most investors and businesses. To address this unforeseen challenge, the ingenuity of technological innovations was further deployed giving rise to digital lending services (popularly known as loan apps), which hitherto were nonexistent in Nigeria prior to the emergence of Covid-19. Digital lending entails the method of applying, processing, and granting loans with the aid of digital channels where lenders place reliance on personal data of customers accessed online or provided by such customers, to make credit decisions, for the benefit of a customer. As digital lending service is no doubt laudable, it came with associated fresh challenges which included violation of customer’s privacy rights and data protection. The main focus of this paper, therefore, is to examine the concept and practice of digital lending in Nigeria, its legal framework and the challenges of customers data protection and privacy rights in Nigeria. The researchers will adopt the doctrinal legal research method wherein reliance will be placed on primary and secondary sources, and based on the findings, certain recommendations would be made.