Creditfix set out to score the unbanked, then began financing motorbikes and phones
A convertible loan from Singapore in 2021 funded the Islamabad lender, which now sells instalment goods under the CreditPer name. It has not said how much it raised or lent.
Creditfix began as an idea about data and has ended up as a business about collateral. Its founder, Owais Zaidi, set out in 2016 to give lenders a credit score for people who have no bank record. By 2022 the Islamabad company, a licensed non bank finance company, was selling Honda motorbikes, phones and laptops on instalments to the same kind of customer, through an app called CreditPer. The shift says something about how hard it is to lend to people without a file, and the company has published almost none of the numbers that would show whether it has worked.
The scoring idea
Zaidi has said the company, started in 2016, was prompted by a man who needed a loan of Rs1,000 and could not afford the daily interest charged in a traditional market. The company's website says about 95 percent of Pakistanis cannot be profiled by conventional credit methods.
In August 2017 Creditfix said it would run a pilot with 50,000 potential customers. The product was a score built from digital data and predictive modelling, using work histories and utility payments to estimate whether a person would repay, with lenders able to see each customer's score. No result of that pilot has been published.
A convertible loan from Singapore
On 16 June 2021 the company announced a seed round led by Insitor Partners of Singapore, which called it its first investment in Pakistan. The structure was an unsecured convertible loan facility. Insitor and the company described it as the first convertible loan from an international investor into a Pakistani company to be approved by the State Bank of Pakistan. ACT Group, Deosai Ventures and private investors took part. The amount was not disclosed.
A convertible loan is debt that can turn into shares at a later funding round. For a lender it is a practical way to raise foreign money: the investor is repaid or becomes an owner, and the company does not have to agree a valuation on day one. The cost to outside readers is that the figure is hidden. Without an amount, nothing about the round can be tested, including how much of it could be lent out.
The announcement did give one useful range. Loans on the platform run from $60 to $6,000. At about Rs155 to the dollar, the rate around the announcement, that is roughly Rs9,300 to Rs930,000, a spread wide enough to cover a phone on one end and a loader or a small business asset on the other. The company said it used a mobile app and artificial intelligence to underwrite asset backed, productive loans at lower cost, and Zaidi referred to a framework he called Risk at Scale for Pakistan and East Africa.
“We are happy to work with our investors that share our vision of profitability with responsibility.”
Selling the asset, not lending the cash
In December 2021 the company signed a memorandum with the payments firm PayPro so that online shoppers could pay for goods in instalments through PayPro's gateway. By August 2022 its CreditPer site listed what it sold: Honda CD70 bikes on a down payment and instalment plan, with partner logos including Atlas Honda, Infinix, Xiaomi and Vivo. A sponsored article in October 2022 added laptops, loaders and scooties for women, with the customer choosing a down payment between 5 and 50 percent and the plan describing payments as interest free.
The two ideas do different work. A cash loan to a person with no record depends entirely on the score, because there is nothing to seize. An instalment sale puts an asset in the customer's hands that the lender can in principle take back and resell, so the score matters less and the resale value matters more. That is how a business built on scoring ended up selling bikes.
The phrase interest free also needs reading. Shariah compliant instalment finance of this kind usually works by the seller buying the item and selling it on at a higher price payable in parts, so the return sits in the price, not in an interest rate. CreditPer has not published its prices or markups, so this describes the usual structure, not a disclosure by the company.
The stated down payment range, 5 to 50 percent, shows how much risk the lender carries. At 5 percent down the lender finances 95 percent of the price, and at 50 percent down it finances half. On an item priced at Rs100,000, the example used below, that is Rs95,000 or Rs50,000 exposed before any markup is counted, and the first figure is nearly double the second. Which end of the range customers choose is not disclosed.
An illustration, with assumed numbers, shows what the structure leaves exposed. Take an item priced at Rs100,000 and a 20 percent down payment, which is inside the stated range. Rs80,000 is financed. If the markup over the cash price were 10 percent of the financed amount, the lender would earn Rs8,000. If the customer then stops paying and the repossessed item resells for Rs8,000 less than the unpaid balance, one such loss cancels the earnings on a single performing account. The proportion of customers who stop paying, which the company has not published, decides the result.
What is not known
The pilot figure can be turned into a rough requirement for capital. The 50,000 were potential customers, not borrowers, so the real book would have been smaller. But if each had borrowed even the smallest loan on the later $60 to $6,000 range, the book would have been $3 million, or about Rs465 million at Rs155 to the dollar. A lender of that size needs funding to match, which is why the undisclosed size of the Insitor loan is the missing number in the story.
Who gains and who loses is also unclear from the record. A buyer with no bank history gets a motorbike or a phone that a bank would not finance, and for a rider or a delivery worker a bike can be the means of earning. The cost is a markup the customer cannot compare, and the risk is repossession if a payment is missed. The investor holds a claim that turns into shares only if the company grows, so its interest lies in the loan book growing without the losses described above. Zaidi's phrase, profitability with responsibility, names that tension without resolving it.
Karachi lender QistBazaar, which also sells goods on instalments, raised Rs500 million through a private sukuk in September 2026 and said how much it was raising. Creditfix has disclosed no loan book, no count of customers and no default rate, and has not said whether the PayPro link went live.
The next thing to look for is simple: the company's accounts, or any statement of how many instalment accounts it has opened since the PayPro link in December 2021. The company's own site, last updated on 18 August 2022, carries no figures, and no funding news about it has appeared since. CreditPer says it is licensed by the SECP as a non bank finance company. Until those or the company's own numbers are public, the claim that data lets it lend safely to the unbanked rests on a pilot nobody has reported and a loan whose size nobody has named.
