Omnisient, a South African-founded fintech and data analytics company, has won the “Best Technology Provider – Data, Analytics & Infrastructure” category at Britain’s Credit Awards, an annual programme run by the industry publisher Credit Strategy, the company said.
Omnisient, selected ahead of a shortlist that included Experian, a FTSE 100 credit-data company that employs about 23,300 people across 32 countries, and SAS, a privately held analytics software firm with annual revenue of more than $3 billion, has developed a secure and privacy-compliant method for credit lenders to access and analyse grocery retail data directly from the retailer.
Lenders can then apply built-in AI to develop predictive models to determine individuals’ risk profile based on the products they purchase and their overall shopping behaviour. This is done without data ever changing hands or the exposure of any consumers’ personal details.
The analysis takes place on anonymized data within a secure and neutral environment. Personal information is never shared or accessible to a 3rd party – not even to Omnisient.
According to the company, shopping behaviour – the contents of a household’s grocery basket over time – can serve as an alternative indicator of creditworthiness for consumers who have little or no formal credit history. Shopping data is rich, universal (almost everyone shops for groceries on a regular basis regardless of one’s financial status) and it’s fresh since it’s updated every few days or weeks depending on an individual’s shopping habits.
“Most credit systems can only assess people who already have a credit record,” said Jon Jacobson, CEO and co-founder of Omnisient.
“We set out to show that everyday data, used with strong privacy protections, can responsibly extend credit to people the system currently cannot see.”
In South Africa, Omnisient said its technology had been used to score more than 8 million such consumers, of whom 3.2 million subsequently qualified for credit for the first time.
The company said the approach improved the accuracy of participating lenders’ risk models, as measured by the Gini coefficient, by 41%.
The figures relate to deployments with Omnisient’s banking and retail partners and were provided by the company.
In 2025, TransUnion, one of the three largest global credit bureaus, acquired a minority stake in Omnisient and took a seat on its board, and later co-led a $12.5 million funding round, the two companies said at the time. Omnisient has said it is using the investment to expand in markets including the United Kingdom, the United States and Brazil.
