Notto’s Manifesto for Africa’s ADI Future

Our mission is to ensure that Alternative Data Intelligence enables Africa to finance its economic majority.

Africa’s economic majority already powers much of the continent’s day-to-day economy. But much of this activity remains difficult for conventional credit systems to recognise and accurately measure at scale. As a result, millions of people and businesses are economically active yet insufficiently visible to formal capital.

This forces large parts of the economy into self-financed growth, which is much slower, less scalable, and out of step with what the broader economy needs.

• People build homes in stages, sometimes waiting years between the foundation, the walls, and the roof.
• Businesses postpone buying equipment until they’ve saved the full cost, even when that equipment could increase production immediately.
• Traders sell one round of inventory before they can afford the next, despite demand already being there.

Credit is how an economy brings parts of its future into the present. But that can only happen when institutions can recognise productive potential at scale, understand the risks involved, and decide what they are prepared to finance.

Africa’s economic majority already contains much of that potential. But what remains missing is the intelligence required to see it clearly enough to act. Closing this gap is one of the most consequential challenges Africa must solve in the coming decades, and Alternative Data Intelligence is the infrastructure to do so.

What is ADI?

Alternative Data Intelligence (ADI) applies artificial intelligence to alternative (non-traditional) economic signals to produce compliant financial insights. This enables banks, fintechs, and telcos to assess income, behaviour, obligations, and risk with greater accuracy and coverage than conventional credit data alone can support.

In doing so, ADI turns the economic activity already happening across Africa's informal and semi-formal economy into intelligence institutions can use to make more confident and responsible credit decisions at scale.

If ADI is successfully developed, a lack of traditional credit history will no longer be a constraint to assessing affordable formal capital.

Someone who keeps up with rent, household bills, or supplier payments can start to look legible to a lender. A business that takes money in through a mix of accounts, wallets, and platforms can be judged on the pattern of work it’s actually doing. And variable cash flow doesn’t have to automatically read as “unreliable” if the ability to repay is there.

This doesn’t mean ADI is a magic wand that makes everyone creditworthy. At its most successful, it means more of Africa’s economic majority gets assessed on their real economic lives, not on the formal paper trail their lives haven’t generated enough of yet.

This distinction matters because when institutions lack sufficient evidence to evaluate risk and repayment capacity, they resort to uncertainty. And uncertainty is expressed through:

• rejection
• collateral requirements
• small limits
• short repayment periods
• interest rates that reflect opacity rather than true risk

Better intelligence changes what institutions can know. It allows them to:

• identify dependable borrowers inside large and fragmented populations
• extend credit at terms that more accurately reflect risk
• learn from every decision they make

The potential is significant. ADI could help financial institutions reach markets they have long wanted to serve but lacked the infrastructure to approach at scale. It could allow good economic behaviour to accumulate into financial reputation. It could help a first loan create the evidence required for a second, and allow successful repayment to lead to better prices, larger limits and longer terms.

Over time, this can change the role of credit in African economic life.

Credit can move beyond emergency borrowing and short-term consumption and become a mechanism through which:

• households acquire assets
• enterprises invest in productive capacity
• people build wealth across generations

But this future is not guaranteed simply by having more data. Economic activity is complex. Income can be variable without being unreliable. Personal and business transactions can pass through the same account. One person’s financial life may be distributed across banks, wallets, mobile networks and payment platforms. Records can be incomplete, duplicated, incorrectly attributed or interpreted without sufficient context.

ADI has to interpret these complex economic realities well enough for institutions to act responsibly. And this creates serious obligations.

Systems capable of seeing more of people’s economic lives could be used to:

• constrain borrower agency
• intensify surveillance
• automate unfair exclusion
• extend credit people cannot responsibly carry

More intelligence does not automatically produce better outcomes. ADI must therefore be built with the same seriousness as the financial institutions expected to depend on it. Identity, data integrity, consent, privacy, security, explainability, and regulatory oversight are core requirements that cannot be considered optional.

We do not believe capability and responsibility can be developed separately. The more economic life ADI can interpret, the greater the obligation to ensure that its judgments are fair, accountable, and appropriate to the decisions being made.

Notto's Three Principles of Responsible ADI

First, ADI should expand human economic agency.

• Help financial institutions recognise credible productive capacity that existing systems can’t adequately see (not simply increase the volume of lending).
• Ensure credit helps people and businesses build, rather than trapping them in cycles of unaffordable borrowing.

Second, the governance of ADI should extend beyond the institutions deploying it.

• People should retain agency over the use of their information
• Regulators should have the visibility required to protect markets and consumers
• Financial institutions should understand the intelligence behind consequential decisions
• The systems through which economic lives become legible must remain accountable to the people whose lives they interpret

Third, ADI should develop through disciplined learning.

Africa’s economic majority cannot be understood through models built entirely in abstraction. Institutions need to:

• deploy carefully
• observe real outcomes
• improve decisions through experience

A gradual transition allows lenders, regulators and consumers to learn together while the risks remain manageable.

The immediate work

There are several things we believe must happen now. First, financial institutions need to begin building practical experience with alternative credit. The opportunity is no longer theoretical. The payment infrastructure exists. Economic activity is increasingly digital. Institutions already understand that a large market sits beyond the reach of conventional credit systems.

But recognising the opportunity is different from building the capability to serve it.

Each institution must learn how ADI fits its risk appetite, governance processes, product strategy and balance sheet. It must develop its own understanding of which signals matter, how products should be structured and how performance should be measured.

This knowledge cannot be acquired instantly after the market has matured. It develops through lending, observation and iteration. The transition should begin with bounded products and manageable exposures. Institutions can extend modest amounts of credit, observe behaviour, refine their models and increase capacity as confidence grows.

This allows a person or business without a formal history to enter a learning cycle without requiring the institution to take an unreasonable risk.

The data infrastructure must also improve. Economic signals need to be connected to reliable identity. Transactions must be accurately attributed and interpreted. Activity distributed across different stores of value needs to become coherent without being duplicated. Repayment systems must make it easy for willing borrowers to meet their obligations when payments become due.

ADI cannot sit outside the systems of risk, governance and control through which financial institutions operate. It must work within them and gradually expand what they are capable of supporting.

Regulators must remain part of this development. The purpose of regulation should be to create the conditions for the credit market to learn, without compromising consumer protection, market integrity, or public trust. The institutions building ADI should welcome this oversight.

The objective is to make responsible progress possible, at the pace responsibility allows.

The longer future

The first widespread applications of ADI will not represent the completion of its purpose.

They will be the beginning of a longer transition in African credit.

Today, much of the continent’s lending is short-term. People borrow for days, weeks or months, often at high prices. These products can solve immediate needs, but they do not represent the full developmental role credit can play.

The larger future is long-term.

It is a future in which:

• a young couple can receive a mortgage that reflects their capacity to repay over the next twenty years
• a growing enterprise can finance machinery against the production it will generate
• a person’s history of meeting obligations can become a financial asset that continues to create opportunity

Reaching this future will require not just ADI, but macroeconomic stability, stronger institutions, responsible lending cultures, patient capital and confidence in the future of African economies. However, none of these conditions remove the need for intelligence. A stable economy still cannot finance people and businesses it does not understand.

ADI gives Africa the ability to build that understanding around its own economic reality rather than waiting for its majority to produce the records of another kind of economy.

This may ultimately matter beyond Africa. The global economy is becoming more digital, more fragmented and less easily described by fixed employment, single bank accounts and static financial records. The infrastructure built to understand Africa’s variable and distributed economic life may become relevant wherever conventional credit history no longer provides a complete picture.

But the point isn’t for Africa to build ADI just to show the world it can innovate. It’s that we can’t keep talking about “potential” while most of that potential is stuck without the financial systems that would let it actually compound.

Africa’s future will be financed when institutions can recognise credible future productivity, understand the risks involved and stand behind it with capital. That is the future we are building toward.

An Africa in which present cash is no longer the final limit of what a person or business can become. An Africa whose economic majority can convert activity into reputation, reputation into trust, and trust into productive capital. An Africa with the intelligence to finance its own emergence.

This is the purpose of Alternative Data Intelligence.

And this is Notto’s work.

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