There are about 304 million international migrants worldwide today. That number has been climbing steadily for decades, accelerated by remote work, skills shortages in OECD countries, and the growing recognition that talent is not distributed in the same places as economic opportunity.
Permanent-type migration to OECD countries set a new record in 2023 with 6.5 million new permanent immigrants, a 10% year-on-year increase and 28% above 2019 levels. The OECD's 2025 migration outlook confirms the structural picture: more than 160 million people living in OECD countries today are foreign-born, up from 9.1% to 11.5% of the population since 2014.
The infrastructure that supports this movement has largely kept pace, with passports verified digitally, visa applications processed online, employment contracts crossing borders within minutes, and academic credentials recognized across jurisdictions. This means that remote work tools can let a developer in Lagos deliver code to a client in Toronto in real time.
Credit history cannot do any of this. For example, if you just moved to a new country, your credit history from home does not follow you. It does not matter if you had a perfect record in Mexico, India, Germany, or Nigeria. In the eyes of lenders in your destination country, you are starting from zero.
Now that virtually every other form of professional or personal identity has been made portable, financial identity remains stubbornly local. And the gap between how mobile people have become and how immobile credit infrastructure remains is now large enough to constitute a structural problem for borrowers, lenders, and the financial systems of countries that have built their growth strategies around attracting global talent.
The architecture of the problem
Credit systems were designed around a simple assumption: the person borrowing money would spend their entire financial life in the same country where they first borrowed. The bureau would accumulate records over time, the score would reflect decades of domestic behavior, and the lender would use it to price risk.
That assumption made sense when international migration was uncommon and expensive. It makes less sense if a Canadian-registered engineer recruits talent from Nairobi and a German automotive company fills skills gaps with Nigerian technicians.
Likewise, it makes no sense at all when Canada, to name the clearest example, runs a points-based immigration system specifically designed to attract economically capable people from all over the world, and then puts those same people through a two-year credit-building process because its financial infrastructure was not designed to read their histories.
Unlike educational and professional profiles, immigrants cannot carry their financial histories with them. The immigrant segment offers significant potential for financial institutions; capitalizing on it will require them to leverage immigrants' financial and credit histories from their home countries.
This observation captures the core mismatch. Every other credential that makes a migrant valuable to a destination country is at least partially portable. Financial identity is not. The practical consequences are well-documented at this point.
Without a domestic credit history, newcomers may struggle to rent an apartment, get a phone plan, or qualify for a car loan. Furthermore, landlords, phone companies, and lenders all check credit, and when they find nothing, many say no.
Having no credit is often treated worse than having bad credit. The newcomer is not starting from a neutral position. They are starting from a position that triggers automatic flags across the financial system, precisely because they arrived after spending their entire adult financial life elsewhere.
Global mobility is accelerating faster than the infrastructure is adapting
The scale of the mismatch is growing, and three forces are driving it simultaneously.
The first is the volume of permanent migration, and the 6.5 million new permanent immigrants to OECD countries in 2023 set a record. Canada's 483,000 permanent residents in 2024 were another record. These are not temporary spikes but rather reflect policy decisions made by governments facing aging populations, labor market shortages, and explicit economic immigration targets.
Plus, the OECD's health workforce data alone tells a story: there were more than 830,000 foreign-born doctors and 1.75 million foreign-born nurses working in OECD countries, representing roughly one quarter and one sixth of their respective workforces. These are not people at the economic margins.
They are senior professionals who arrive with invisible credit and spend their first years unable to access the financial products their income and education would easily support if the credit infrastructure could see them.
The second force is temporary and project-based migration. The global remote workforce has turned cross-border work into an everyday reality, with 90% of gig workers prioritizing quick access to their earnings when choosing payment systems.
Furthermore, professionals who move between countries for two or three-year contracts, a growing category across tech, finance, and healthcare, face repeated credit resets. Every move means a new domestic credit file built from scratch, regardless of what the previous country's bureau holds.
This means that a professional who has lived and worked in three countries for a decade could technically have strong credit histories in all three, yet be classified as thin-file in the fourth country they move to.
Finally, the third force is the demographic composition of migration flows. The fastest-growing source countries for Canada and other OECD destinations are disproportionately in Africa, where robust financial data infrastructure exists but has no established connection to destination countries' credit systems.
Nigeria has two nationally licensed credit bureaus, and Kenya's financial inclusion rate, driven heavily by mobile money adoption, exceeds 83% of adults. Furthermore, Ghana, Uganda, South Africa, and Rwanda all have functioning credit reporting frameworks. This shows that the data is there, but the bridge to OECD credit infrastructure is not.
Why the system has been slow to respond
Credit infrastructure is not slow to adapt because the problem is unrecognized. The banking and lending industry has understood this problem for years, and the volume of fintech activity in the cross-border credit space confirms it.
For example, immigrant credit fintech Pillar raised millions of dollars at pre-seed, founded by Revolut alumni, on the explicit premise that immigrants have to start again every time they move to another country and that credit bureaus are rarely coordinated or joined up across countries. Likewise, Nova Credit, now partnered with JPMorganChase, Scotiabank, American Express, and HSBC UK, has been building cross-border credit infrastructure for nearly a decade.
The adaptation is slow because the problem is technically and regulatory complex in ways that a general-purpose fintech solution cannot fully resolve. There are three layers to the challenge.
The first is data format incompatibility. A bureau file from Nigeria's CRC does not look like a TransUnion file. Likewise, a Kenyan Metropol record does not map directly onto an Equifax tradeline. Plus, score ranges, account type classifications, and delinquency definitions differ.
Normalizing these into a format a Canadian or American underwriter can use without rebuilding their risk model requires source-specific translation logic that takes years to build correctly and depends on direct relationships with the bureaus themselves, not third-party data aggregators.
The second is consent and data sovereignty. In many emerging markets, individuals have mobile wallets or fintech accounts but lack access to traditional correspondent banking networks needed for international transfers.
Getting data from those systems into a destination-country credit workflow requires compliance with the source country's data protection law — Nigeria's NDPR, Kenya's Data Protection Act, Ghana's Data Protection Act — as well as the destination country's privacy framework. A generic cross-border data product that lacks a built-in country-specific compliance architecture is not a real solution. It is a liability transfer to the lender.
The third is identity verification across non-standard document types. The credit data is only useful if the lender can confirm the person presenting it is the same person the data belongs to.
For African newcomers, this means verifying BVNs, NINs, Cameroonian national IDs, and Ghanaian voter cards, documents that standard KYC tools were not designed to handle, against primary government databases, with fraud detection built into the same pipeline.
A solution that handles credit data retrieval but not identity verification leaves the most critical step to the lender.
How Zeeh is built for this shift
Zeeh was built specifically to address the technical and regulatory gaps that general-purpose cross-border credit solutions have not closed for African newcomers. The platform connects three data layers, verified identity, normalized bureau data, and cash flow analysis, into a single workflow that a lender can access through a unified API integration.
First, ZeehID handles the identity layer with direct integrations into African government and bureau systems, including BVN and NIN verification in Nigeria, Cameroonian national ID, Ghanaian voter card and passport, Kenyan national identity documents, combined with biometric matching, device-level fraud signals, and sanctions screening.
This step is embedded in the same pipeline as credit retrieval, rather than being separated into a distinct product that the lender has to assemble on their own.
With Credit History integration, businesses can retrieve bureau data from CRC and FirstCentral in Nigeria, Metropol in Kenya, XDS in Ghana, and equivalent sources across other African countries, then normalize it into score equivalents and tradeline formats that fit existing Canadian underwriting systems.
The consent architecture is borrower-facing, plain-language, and auditable against the data protection requirements of both source and destination jurisdictions.
Then, Insights adds real-time cash flow analysis using open banking transaction data for borrowers whose formal bureau record is thin or whose recent Canadian banking history can supplement and validate what the foreign bureau record already shows.
The combined output is what a lender needs to close the newcomer credit gap: a verified identity, a longitudinal repayment history from the source country, and a current financial behavior signal from the destination country. Not two of the three, but all three.
Final thoughts
Immigration offers a multi-billion-dollar opportunity for the financial services industry, much of which remains untapped. That assessment is not new. What is new is the scale of the population it applies to, the speed at which it is growing, and the increasing gap between how mobile the global workforce has become and how static the credit infrastructure supporting it remains.
The credit system was designed for people who don't move, but most people move. And the financial institutions that build the infrastructure to serve them as they actually are, rather than as a domestic-only credit system as they imagine it, will capture a customer base that is growing faster and more economically capable than any other demographic entering the lending market today.
This is why Zeeh exists: we provide financial institutions with the verified identity, cross-border credit history, and cash flow data needed to underwrite African newcomers from day one through a unified API. Book a demo with our sales team to explore seamless newcomer underwriting.
