Think about what a bank asks for when you apply for a loan. Payslip. Employer letter. Bank statement showing regular salary deposits.
Now think about a Bolt driver. They earn money every day, sometimes good money, but none of it comes in the form a bank recognises. No payslip. No employer. No neat monthly deposit. As far as the formal credit system is concerned, they might as well not have income at all.
Fido and Bolt built something that actually solves this. The partnership, which won Non-Bank Partnership of the Year at the 5th Ghana Fintech Awards on March 28, extends credit to ride-hailing drivers using their ride history as the basis for underwriting.
How many trips they complete, how consistently they drive, what their earnings pattern looks like over time. The data already exists inside Bolt's platform.
Fido built the lending logic on top of it.
This is interesting to me because it touches a much bigger question than ride-hailing. The majority of working Ghanaians are self-employed. Market traders, artisans, drivers, small-scale farmers. They generate income, often reliably, but they cannot prove it in ways that satisfy traditional lenders.
The result is that formal credit flows almost entirely to salaried workers, who are actually the minority of the workforce.
What Fido did with Bolt is a proof of concept for a different approach.
Instead of asking gig workers to look like salaried employees, you use the data their work already generates. A driver's trip history is functionally equivalent to a payslip. It shows earning capacity, consistency, and activity levels.
The award recognition is nice, but the real measure will be default rates and repeat borrowing. If drivers are taking loans, repaying them, and coming back for more, the model works. If default rates climb, it means the underwriting needs refinement.
Ghana has roughly 10 million self-employed workers. Fido and Bolt built a credit product for one slice of that population. The default rate data has not been published.
