Kenyan lenders face more challenges managing bad loans this year than their Nigerian counterparts even as credit losses threaten to increase in both nations, Renaissance Capital has said. According to Bloomberg, Adesoji Solanke, director for frontier and sub-Saharan Africa banks at Renaissance Capital in London, said that banks in Kenya were more exposed to small- and medium-sized companies as well as retail businesses, which are more sensitive to economic shocks. He noted that Nigerian lenders had larger exposure to dollar loans and big firms, with a higher capacity to survive downturns. Specifically, he stated that while Kenyan banks tend to sit on dead-weight loans for longer because they are required to exhaust all recovery options before scrapping the debt, Nigerian banks typically write-off fully provisioned loans after a year on their books.
