Omnisient, a Cape Town-founded consumer data company, won the Banking Grand Prix at the 2026 Money20/20 awards in Las Vegas, the top prize in the banking category at America's largest fintech event. It won for a project with two major South African banks and a national grocery retailer that used shopping history to help the banks lend to people with little or no credit record.

"This is South African innovation developed around a challenge that matters to people's lives: being excluded from credit because the available information does not tell their full story," said chief executive and co-founder Jon Jacobson.

The idea is that years of grocery shopping say something about a person's ability to repay, even if they have never had a loan. Consistent spending, what they buy, and how that changes over time all add context a credit bureau cannot see.

Omnisient says the banks used this to score about 8 million South Africans who are "credit-invisible", with no file or too little history for a normal credit score. That is about 38% of the country's credit-invisible population. Of those scored, 3.2 million, or about 40%, qualified for credit they would previously have been denied.

The company says its models predicted repayment 41% better than approaches without credit history, and one bank projected a 29% rise in credit revenue. These figures come from Omnisient's own award submissions, not an independent audit.

The privacy design is central to the pitch. Personal details are scrambled before analysis; the banks and retailer never exchange raw customer data, the retailer keeps control of its data, and the banks make their own lending decisions.

Omnisient was founded in 2019 by Jacobson and Anton Grutzmacher, is now headquartered in the UK, and raised a $12.5-million Series A, about R206 million, in 2025. Its backers include credit bureau TransUnion and Shoprite Holdings. It is now selling the approach to US banks as a product called Basket Signals.

"A bank may see that a customer spent $150 at a retailer, but that transaction alone tells it little about the purchases behind it," said Imran Bhatti, its chief revenue officer for North America.

TechFinancials carried the announcement of the win. The same project won the Best Technology Provider award at Britain's Credit Awards in June, ahead of a shortlist that included Experian. Jacobson wrote for the World Economic Forum that the South African project ran between "the continent's largest grocery retailer" and its leading banks, using privacy-enhancing technology so no personal identities were revealed.

This is one of the clearest examples yet of a South African fintech solving a local problem and exporting the answer. Millions of people here are shut out of affordable credit not because they cannot repay but because no one can see that they can, the same gap behind Botswana's 42% unbanked and the informal traders Pepkor, Shoprite and the banks are chasing.

Using shopping data instead is a smart way to fill it. Two things are worth watching as it grows. The first is how much the shoppers know. The data comes from a retailer's loyalty programme, and someone signing up for grocery discounts may not expect their basket to help decide a loan, so clear consent and plain explanations will matter.

The second is that a tool that can show someone is creditworthy can also mark them as risky, and anyone declined should be able to find out why.

Omnisient's privacy-first design gives it a strong starting point, which counts for a lot in a week when Ampath confirmed a breach of patient data.

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