For most of my career, I did not set out to teach lending.
I was busy practising it. Building products. Scaling Product Sales. Sitting in credit committee meetings. Debating risk thresholds. Arguing about pricing. Cleaning up operational messes nobody wanted to admit existed. Watching good ideas fail not because they were wrong, but because they were misunderstood, poorly executed, or badly governed.
Somewhere along the way, I realised something uncomfortable: doing lending and explaining lending are two very different skills.
In practice, many people survive in lending by intuition, precedent, or sheer momentum. They inherit models they do not fully understand. They repeat processes because “this is how it’s always been done.” They learn by firefighting rather than by design. That can work for a while. Until it doesn’t.
Teaching lending, on the other hand, forces clarity. It forces you to slow down and explain why something works, not just that it works. It exposes gaps that experience alone can hide. And it requires you to connect dots across risk, product, operations, finance, governance, and people in a way most organisations never formally do.
That gap is why I built Aakkio.
The Problem With How Lending Knowledge Is Transferred
In most lending organisations, knowledge transfer is informal and fragmented.
Junior staff learn by shadowing seniors. Product managers learn just enough risk to be dangerous. Risk teams focus on models without understanding customer journeys. Operations teams inherit reconciliations they do not fully trust. Founders and executives make high-stakes decisions with partial visibility.
Training, where it exists, is usually one of two extremes:
- Overly academic, abstract, and disconnected from real-world constraints.
- Or hyper-specific to one institution’s processes, making it hard to generalise or scale.
What is missing is structured, practical education that reflects how lending actually works in the real world, especially in emerging markets where systems, data quality, regulation, and customer behaviour are far from textbook.
I have seen incredibly smart people struggle not because they lack intelligence, but because no one ever taught them the full picture.
Experience Alone Is Not a Curriculum
One of the most common assumptions in financial services is that experience automatically equals understanding. It doesn’t.
I have met people with ten years in lending who have never thought deeply about unit economics. Senior managers who cannot clearly articulate how pricing, default rates, and collections efficiency interact. Teams that run credit committees without a shared definition of risk appetite.
Experience can teach you what happened. It does not always teach you why it happened, or how to design systems that prevent it from happening again.
Aakkio was designed to bridge that gap. Not by dumbing things down, and not by overcomplicating them, but by making implicit knowledge explicit.
Why Aakkio Is Not a “Course Platform”
Aakkio is not a generic education site. It is a practitioner-led learning environment for people who already operate in, or want to operate in, credit-led businesses.
Every course is built around a simple principle:
If you cannot explain it clearly, you do not understand it well enough.
That applies whether we are talking about:
- Credit risk frameworks
- Product design and rollout
- Financial operations and reporting
- Collections and recovery strategy
- Governance and compliance
- Or how to build and manage effective lending teams
The goal is not memorisation. The goal is decision quality.
I want people who go through Aakkio to think more clearly in meetings, ask better questions, design better systems, and avoid mistakes that are expensive but avoidable.
Teaching Forces Accountability
Building Aakkio has forced me to interrogate my own thinking.
When you teach, you cannot hide behind jargon. You cannot gloss over trade-offs. You cannot say “it depends” without explaining what it depends on. You are forced to confront contradictions and edge cases.
That discipline is healthy. It sharpens practice as much as it improves learning.
It also creates something the lending ecosystem desperately needs: a shared language. When teams understand the same fundamentals, conversations become more productive. Decisions become faster. Accountability becomes clearer.
That is the ecosystem impact I care about.
Why This Matters Now
Lending is becoming more complex, not less.
Technology has lowered barriers to entry, but it has also increased the cost of mistakes. Regulation is tightening. Capital is more discerning. Customers are less forgiving. And poor decisions compound faster at scale.
In this environment, intuition is not enough. Neither is copying what worked elsewhere without understanding context.
Education is no longer optional. It is infrastructure.
Aakkio exists because I believe the next generation of lending businesses will be built not just on capital and technology, but on clarity of thinking.
That is what we teach. And that is why I built it.
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If you are building, operating, or advising a lending business, these are not abstract ideas. They are practical decisions that show up every day in pricing, risk, operations, collections, and governance.
At Aakkio, we teach lending the way it actually works in practice. Our academy is designed for founders, operators, product leaders, risk professionals, and finance teams who want to understand the full picture, not just one function in isolation.
You can explore our courses and learning paths at Aakkio Academy, where we go deeper into the frameworks, examples, and real-world trade-offs behind the topics discussed here.
Oke Egbi
Founder & Principal Consultant, Aakkio Consulting
Senior fintech executive and lending expert with over a decade of experience building, scaling, and advising credit-led financial products across Africa.
