In 2015, the Central Bank of West African States selected a private credit bureau to build a digital platform to collect and analyse financial data across the eight-country West African Economic and Monetary Union, including the activities of credit cooperatives and microfinance agencies that serve many West African borrowers. The credit-reporting platform promises to produce new and valuable knowledge about borrowers’ creditworthiness and risk. But valuable in what ways and for whom? Private credit bureaus rely on vast arrays of personal and financial data in order to produce credit reports and consumer credit scores that claim to represent the creditworthiness of individual borrowers. Cooperative loan officers, instead, understand creditworthiness to be highly variable and rely on relational metrics in order to determine risk as well as carefully overseeing existing loans to ensure their timely repayment. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with loan officers at a small-scale credit cooperative in Lomé, Togo, this article examines how the impending arrival of a private credit bureau and new credit-reporting technologies highlights the distinction between the ways in which credit bureaus and loan officers understand the nature of financial risk, as well as the centrality of loan officers and their management of borrower debt in sustaining the field of small-scale lending in Togo.

2015 年，西非国家中央银行选择了一家私人信用局来建立一个数字平台，以收集和分析西非经济和货币联盟八个国家的金融数据，包括为许多国家提供服务的信用合作社和小额信贷机构的活动西非借款人。信用报告平台承诺提供有关借款人信用和风险的新的和有价值的知识。但在哪些方面有价值，对谁有价值？私人征信机构依靠大量的个人和财务数据来生成信用报告​​和消费者信用评分，这些信用报告和消费者信用评分声称代表了个人借款人的信誉。相反，合作信贷员 了解信用度是高度可变的，并依靠关系指标来确定风险，并仔细监督现有贷款以确保及时偿还。本文基于与多哥洛美一家小型信用合作社的信贷员进行的民族志实地调查，探讨了即将到来的私人征信局和新的信用报告技术如何突出征信局和信贷员的方式之间的区别了解金融风险的性质，以及信贷员的中心地位及其对借款人债务的管理，以维持多哥小规模贷款领域。