Episode 2: What Africa Can Teach the Industry About Credit & Collections
Collections Conversations, Season 2 (with C&R)
Welcome to Season 2 of Collections Conversations, a new miniseries from Fintech Takes, sponsored by our friends at C&R Software. The series digs into how generative AI is reshaping debt collections, and this season, we’re surveying everything that happens after origination by bouncing around different markets and talking to folks with different experiences.Copy anchor linkCopied
In Episode 2, I sit down with Neré Jansen Van Vuuren, Head of Sales for Africa at C&R Software, who has spent most of her career working for banks and lenders across the continent.
We explore how credit works when a household’s income arrives on market days and after harvests rather than as a monthly salary, and what that asks of lenders once a payment is missed.
Neré says you can approve a loan in minutes, but the real test comes when a salary is late or a transport is delayed. A missed payment, she says, is a signal; not an explanation.
I love that point because too often, I see lenders jump at the signal without waiting for the explanation. And in the U.S., we tend to check affordability at origination and rarely afterward, even though I think we should keep assessing it for the life of the loan.
Highlights include:Copy anchor linkCopied
- Why many South African households manage a portfolio of diverse income streams, and why what looks irregular on a spreadsheet may be a deliberate, resilient strategy
- Why a sale isn’t a sale if the money’s not in the bank, and why many fintechs underestimate how different servicing is from acquisition
- How AI, ironically, can make collections conversations more personal than they are today
Neré’s closing thought? Access only becomes inclusion when the product works with how people earn, travel, trade, borrow, repay, and recover from financial pressure.
Big thanks to C&R Software for making the conversation possible.
