Any person with a conservative perspective of CIS Kenya’s mandate would be forgiven for asking the question: How does CIS Kenya harmonize its traditional role of developing a credit information sharing system with its new leadership role of promoting Sustainable Finance among non-banking institutions in Kenya? The answer lies in the recognition that our membership requires a more comprehensive view of the risks that confront them. There is no doubt that information asymmetry threatens the quality of the loan book. The solutions that credit bureaus offer by providing credit bureau reports, scores and other products are largely used to mitigate …

This paper makes the case for agricultural lenders in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) to upgrade the sources of information collateral by placing more reliance on credit bureaus than less sophisticated structures such as  group-based savings and lending techniques. Properly licensed and regulated credit bureaus, having access to a wide range of formal and informal, positive and negative data, are a more efficient and effective means for character-based lending to mitigate risk, reduce operating costs and enforce repayment…Read on.  Developing CIS platforms for derisking lending to Agriculture in Subsaharan Africa.pdf …

The experience of Credit Information Sharing (“CIS”) in Kenya is a case study in market and stakeholder coordination in order to build a robust financial infrastructure. Kenya’s experience, until 2008 was much like many other countries: a story of fits and starts with limited progress and effectiveness. In 2008, a number of stakeholders including donors, industry associations, regulators and financial institutions began working together to solve an intractable problem: how to create an effective CIS market. The Kenyan experience is best captured and distilled in three separate stand-alone documents, each serving a different purpose. This document (CIS Toolkit – Case …

This second document (CIS Toolkit – Step-By-Step Guide) is useful for those who want to dig deeper, for a high-level guide on how to replicate Kenya’s experience in a different country. The high-level guide takes the insights from the case study and converts them to actionable steps that regulators, donors and financial institutions in other markets can follow to achieve similar results. Naturally, each country is different and there will be invariable differences. Still, the general principles captured in the high-level guide serve as important sign posts to follow to maximise the odds of success.  CIS Toolkit – Credit Providers …

This third document (CIS Toolkit – High-level Toolkit for Practitioners) seeks to ensure that the ultimate success metric is achieved: participation in CIS by all financial institutions. It is a step-by-step guide for credit providers on how to go about preparing to join the CIS mechanism. Although mainly created for credit providers, it is equally useful to donors and regulators who need to understand the key issues credit providers grapple with and areas in which either technical assistance or regulatory intervention can be most effective.  CIS Toolkit – High-level Guide.docx …

This report was commissoned by CIS Kenya and FSD Kenya to understand the current perceptions of market participants regarding the usage of the CIS mechanism, its impact on the market and remaining constraints to the development of an effective credit sharing mechanism in Kenya.  CIS Effectiveness …

This brief constitutes a report on the above training conducted on 12th May 2016 by CIS Kenya for its members. This initiative was intended to expose credit officers to credit scoring development and intepretation. CIS Kenya intends to make training a core activity and therefore this one-day training served as a pilot to inform future training undertakings. The training was attended by 42 delegates from commercial banks, credit reference bureaus, development finance institutions, microfinance institutions, saccos and state lenders. Credit Bureau Reports and Scoring report …