Traditional lending in markets with thin credit-bureau coverage relies on paperwork proxies for creditworthiness — payslips, land titles, guarantors — that exclude exactly the people a digital platform is best positioned to serve: gig workers, small traders, people whose income is real but informal.
Zuma Loans instead scores eligibility primarily off a customer's own transaction history inside the Zuma Wallet — top-up frequency and consistency, spend patterns across the platform's other services, on-time repayment of any prior micro-loan. None of this requires a payslip, because the wallet's ledger already is a verified income and spending record, built from real settled transactions rather than self-reported documents.
The risk-control side matters just as much as the scoring side: loan limits start small and scale up only after a track record is established on the platform itself, and repayment is structured as an automatic wallet deduction rather than a separate manual step the borrower has to remember. This behavioural-data approach to credit is a pattern that generalises well beyond Zuma — any platform sitting on top of real transaction data has the raw material for underwriting, if it's willing to build the scoring model instead of asking for a payslip.