Overview:
Nigerian credit-data firm CreditChek has acquired Ugandan core-banking software startup Algosys, its first move into Uganda and a step into East Africa.
CreditChek, a Nigerian credit-data company, has acquired Algosys, a Ugandan core-banking software startup, the two firms have announced.
The value of the deal was not disclosed. Algosys will operate as a subsidiary of CreditChek in what the buyer described as its first move into Uganda and part of a wider push across East Africa.
Algosys, founded about two years ago by Innocent Bigega and Simon Tayebwa, supplies software to lenders, savings and credit co-operatives (Saccos) and microfinance institutions. The company says it serves 22 financial institutions and has facilitated more than 10,000 Sacco loans.
CreditChek said the acquisition would let it combine its credit-assessment and financial-data tools with Algosys’s banking technology and its existing relationships with Ugandan lenders.
“Our ambition is to own more of the value chain in the lending process,” said Kingsley Ibe, CreditChek’s chief executive and co-founder. He said the company wanted to move beyond supplying data towards systems that help lenders take on customers, assess risk, issue loans and manage them.
CreditChek said it had chosen Uganda because of its growing fintech sector and high uptake of mobile money. The company pointed to figures it said showed Ugandan startups raised about $30m in venture funding in 2025 — more than seven times the previous year — making the country the second-largest destination for startup funding in East Africa after Kenya.
The company also cited data attributed to the World Bank indicating that 67.7% of Ugandan adults had a mobile-money account in 2024, and figures attributed to the International Monetary Fund putting the number of fintech firms in the country at about 250. According to the same IMF figures, loan disbursements and repayments rose by 121.7% and 139.0% respectively in the year to December 2024.
Earlier this year CreditChek raised $600,000 to fund its East African expansion, having reached profitability in Nigeria. The firm has said it plans to enter Kenya, Tanzania and Rwanda, and later French-speaking markets.
“East Africa is not one market; every country has its own financial behaviour, data sources, regulatory environment and lending dynamics,” said Lionel Orishane, CreditChek’s chief technology officer and co-founder. He said the firm intended to build locally relevant systems rather than transplant its Nigerian product.
Innocent Bigega, Algosys’s founder, said joining CreditChek would give the company access to a larger technology platform and more resources while it continued serving its existing customers.
CreditChek said Algosys’s current products would keep running and that customers would gain access to its wider technology over time.