Zeeh Africa, a Nigerian open-finance startup that builds APIs to enable businesses to verify customers and access their bank data, has relaunched its Direct Debit feature as it pushes deeper into payments infrastructure and tries to solve one of the most persistent pain points in the country’s digital lending market: getting borrowers to repay.
The move comes as loan performance weakened in Q2 2025. More borrowers are falling behind on unsecured loan repayments, according to the Central Bank of Nigeria’s (CBN) Credit Conditions Survey for Q2 2025. With the rise of digital lenders—which have more than doubled in the last two years—it has become easier to access uncollateralised loans. Yet, a net balance of -1.5, according to the report, shows that lenders reported higher defaults on loans.
“The irony of Nigeria’s fintech boom is that while we’ve made it incredibly easy to disburse loans, we’ve remained inefficient at collecting repayments,” said David Adeleke, Zeeh Africa CEO. “Manual follow-ups, failed bank transfers, and unreliable payment promises create a cycle where good borrowers get lumped with bad ones.”
Direct Debit allows businesses to automatically debit their customers’ accounts on agreed-upon dates, provided those customers have consented. In Nigeria, where lenders still depended on manual reminders and repeated follow-ups as recently as 2024, these automated debit flows have become important for credit providers, buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) firms, and subscription businesses that struggle with failed or inconsistent payments.
Founded in 2022 by Adeleke and Frank Uwajeh, Zeeh Africa enables financial service providers to access customer bank data, verify identities, analyse creditworthiness, and automate parts of their lending workflow. Adeleke said he saw a gap in the market where lenders struggled to ethically recover loans from borrowers; this prompted the startup to build Direct Debit. Zeeh first introduced the product in 2024 but shut it down later that year.
“[We shut it down] so we could build a better system now,” said Adeleke. “The traction we were getting last year [for Direct Debit] was undefined, hence we needed a complete overhaul. This time, we have a proper system for tracking usage.”
Zeeh launched a beta version of the product in February, onboarding 20 businesses, including digital lenders, school-financing platforms, and subscription-based service providers, to test the feature. The company says the relaunched product is now powering 22 businesses. Across its product lines, including ID verification, access to customer bank data, credit-risk analysis, and automated loan-recovery tools, Zeeh serves 150 enterprises.
“We’ve done over 5 million API calls to our key products year-to-date,” said Adeleke. “With Direct Debit, our core strength has always been our open banking focus—data sharing, KYC, credit insights, and credit history we draw from bureaus, and bank statement analysis.”
Jerry Nwosu, the startup’s CTO appointed in October, was critical in leading the product’s relaunch. Zeeh’s Direct Debit product has two key features: first, it allows customers to pay loans in installments, structure repayments, and set recurring transactions in a way that all parties involved, such as BNPL lenders and borrowers, consent to. Second, customers can authorise debits through signed mandates that define how much can be taken and for how long. Zeeh automates the rest through scheduled debits and real-time status updates.
“We’re seeing particularly strong interest from pay-later companies that have built solid underwriting but struggle with the operational burden of chasing payments,” said Ogechi Mbaka, product manager at Zeeh Africa. “Instead of employing large collections teams or accepting 30% default rates as normal, they can automate the entire repayment flow while maintaining full transparency with customers.”
The startup says this mandate-based flow aligns with the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission’s (FCCPC) July 2025 digital lending regulations, which require transparent, consented repayment methods and ban aggressive or privacy-violating collection practices.
Yet Zeeh is stepping into a market dominated by well-funded incumbents. Several African fintechs and payment gateways, including Flutterwave, Paystack, Moniepoint’s Monnify, Kora, and Mono, already offer Direct Debit products.
Zeeh says it is pitching itself to digital lenders to have an edge. With its Direct Debit product, it plans to tie the entire credit journey together—identity verification, affordability checks, bank statement analysis, and payments—under one infrastructure layer, instead of having lenders stitch together separate providers.
The startup plans to extend the new product to additional payment rails and expand its availability outside Nigeria through UseZeeh, a unified gateway for businesses to access its APIs and developer tools. For now, the unanswered question is how quickly this can scale and whether the startup can win a meaningful share from well-funded incumbents already powering recurring payments across the continent.
