Pakistani lending fintech AdalFi has signed a partnership with Network International, a payments company serving banks and merchants in the region, to sell its cash-flow lending scores to banks across the Middle East and Africa. The deal was announced in a press release published by Profit on 11 November.
It is an example of a credit model built for Pakistani banks being sold to lenders in the Gulf and beyond.
What the AdalFi and Network International deal covers
Under the agreement, Network International will look for lending and cross-selling opportunities inside the payment data it already processes for its clients. AdalFi will build and validate the scoring and customer segmentation models, and plug its loan decisioning into Network International's platform.
The idea is that a bank's everyday card and payment data gives a live picture of whether a customer can afford a loan. Instead of broad lending campaigns, lenders can make pre-qualified offers to people the data says can repay.
According to the release, Network International works with more than 250 financial institutions and over 240,000 merchants in more than 50 countries.
AdalFi's cash-flow lending record in Pakistan
AdalFi works behind the scenes for banks rather than lending in its own name. Its platform scores borrowers on their transaction data and pays out loans through the bank's own core banking and loan systems.
The company says more than Rs110 billion has been lent through its platform since 2021 by nine partner banks, including six of Pakistan's ten largest. It reports more than 130,000 borrowers, over half of them new to formal credit, and a default rate of about 0.2%, against roughly 3.5% for conventionally underwritten bank credit. These are the company's own figures and have not been independently audited.
AdalFi raised $7.5 million in seed funding in February 2023, as ProPakistani reported at the time.
Why it matters for fintech in Pakistan
Many borrowers in Pakistan have no credit history a bank can read. By AdalFi's own count, more than half of its borrowers were new to formal credit. Scoring people on how money moves through their accounts, rather than on collateral or a salary slip, is one of the few approaches that has worked at bank scale.
The partnership also points to a route abroad for Pakistani fintechs: selling the infrastructure, not the consumer app, to larger payment networks in the Gulf, where Pakistan's remittance and trade corridors already run. For more on how Pakistani banks are working with fintechs, see our coverage of the Allied Bank Fintech Hackathon and our banking news.