FAQ
Honest from the first hello.
Any new credit tool owes you the truth about what it can prove. Here is ours, in plain language, followed by the questions lenders actually ask.
We show our work, and we mark what is still pending.
Measured today
Extraction quality
Checked against labelled statements and human review.
Assessment consistency
Same statement in, same cash-flow picture out.
Proven later, with real loans
Predictive accuracy
Only testable once real pilot loans season, six to twelve months in.
Evidence for a decision, never the decision itself.
Common questions
The questions lenders actually ask.
The basics
Who is Hola Credit for?
Hola Credit is designed for authorised Namibian microlenders and retail credit teams who assess applicants whose income patterns do not fit a salary-only model. If you lend to self-employed, freelance, or irregular-income applicants, Hola Credit can help structure the cash-flow evidence from their bank statements.
Is Hola Credit a credit bureau?
No. Hola Credit does not maintain a database of borrower credit histories, does not share information between lenders, and does not report to formal credit bureaus. It processes a single borrower-authorised statement for a single lender. Cross-lender shared borrower profiles are not part of the current product.
Does Hola Credit approve or decline applicants?
No. Hola Credit supplies evidence, confidence levels, and limitations. The lender adds their own notes, applies their own policies, and makes the final decision. That decision is recorded separately from the Hola Credit assessment, so the audit trail is always clear about who decided what and on what basis.
How it works
What does the assessment measure?
The assessment evaluates cash-flow evidence across seven components: income floor, consistency, volatility, trend, concentration, red flags, and data sufficiency. Each component captures a different dimension of the applicant's financial pattern, and each carries its own confidence level based on the quality and sufficiency of the underlying data.
How long does an assessment take?
The upload-to-assessment pipeline targets completion within sixty seconds at the defined percentile. This is a processing-time target, not a claim about decision quality or approval outcomes. Cases with low-confidence data are routed to a human review queue rather than rushed through.
What banks are supported?
The initial launch supports statements from FNB Namibia, Bank Windhoek, Standard Bank Namibia, and Nedbank Namibia. Format validation and extraction accuracy are measured separately for each bank.
What file formats are accepted?
PDF, PNG, and JPEG. PDF is always preferred because it preserves the original layout and text encoding, which makes extraction more reliable. Image-based uploads go through OCR as a fallback, which is less reliable than direct PDF text extraction.
Scoring
Is the scoring deterministic?
Yes. The scoring engine uses versioned code with fixed rules. Given the same extracted transactions and the same policy version, the engine will always produce the same score. There is no randomness, no hidden state, and no model discretion in the scoring step. AI is used in the extraction and categorisation phase, but the scoring engine is a separate, deterministic process.
What is the income floor?
The income floor is the minimum reliable monthly income the statement can support. It is derived from consistent credit transactions, discounted for concentration risk and volatility. It is not a prediction of future earnings. It is a conservative measure of what the statement evidence can demonstrate. When data is insufficient, the income floor may be null rather than a potentially misleading number.
Can the first score predict repayment outcomes?
No. Predictive accuracy against repayment outcomes can only be tested after real pilot loans have seasoned. This process takes six to twelve months before the results are statistically meaningful. Hola Credit does not claim predictive accuracy before that data exists. The assessment should be treated as supplementary evidence, not as a validated predictor of repayment.
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