As the fintech subsidiary of Access Holdings, Oxygen X built a risk foundation that surfaces high-risk and emerging fraud patterns traditional controls miss.
Key results:
- Archer consistently flagged high-risk behaviour early
- More than 2× total ROI with Archer
- ~4× revenue growth over six months
- Customer experience preserved, with approval rates improving by approximately 5%
- Operational scale without increasing headcount
Overview
Oxygen X is a Nigeria-based fintech licensed as a Finance Company by the Central Bank of Nigeria and a subsidiary of Access Holdings, the holding company of Access Bank, the largest bank in Africa by customer volume.
As a credit-led fintech, Oxygen X supports consumer and SME growth through structured credit and fixed-term investment products within the regulated Access Holdings ecosystem.
As new digital channels were introduced, the Oxygen X leadership team made an early decision to embed a proactive fraud prevention capability that could scale with the business while maintaining strong risk controls. Rather than waiting to respond to incidents after losses occurred, the team focused on building a risk foundation capable of identifying emerging threats early and supporting continued product expansion.
To support this approach, Oxygen X deployed Archer as its core fraud detection and risk platform.
The Challenge: Staying ahead of evolving fraud in a fast-moving market
Nigeria’s fintech environment is high-velocity, with fraud patterns that evolve continuously and often emerge through coordinated behaviour across multiple accounts. Drawing on extensive experience operating regulated financial institutions in Nigeria, the Oxygen X risk team understood that many of the most damaging threats would not follow static or predictable patterns.
From prior experience across the ecosystem, the team had seen the limitations of approaches that rely only on rigid, slow-to-change fraud rules. While rules remain essential, inflexible implementations can struggle to adapt as fraud tactics evolve, frequently generating excessive false positives while still missing coordinated or emerging behaviour.
Rather than relying on reactive controls or blunt rule sets, Oxygen X set out to establish a risk capability that could anticipate new patterns, evolve quickly, and surface meaningful signals early, without restricting legitimate customers or slowing growth.
At the same time, regulatory expectations continued to rise, with licensed institutions expected to demonstrate stronger, more proactive approaches to fraud prevention as part of ongoing operations.
OxygenX required a platform that could:
- Anticipate evolving and coordinated fraud patterns
- Detect risk early without sacrificing customer approvals
- Support efficient investigations as transaction volumes scale
- Align with group-level and regulatory expectations
- Enable the rollout of new digital and customer acquisition channels
The Archer Solution
OxygenX deployed Archer as an integrated fraud detection and investigation platform embedded directly into its backend systems and risk workflows.
Key capabilities implemented included:
- A configurable rules engine with historical backtesting, allowing controls to be validated and refined before production deployment
- Real-time monitoring to identify emerging risk as activity occurs
- Cluster analysis and entity resolution to surface coordinated behaviour and mule networks across accounts
- Centralized case management and investigation workflows to streamline analyst decision-making
- Real-time alerting and operational response
Archer was adopted as a foundational component of Oxygen X’s risk infrastructure, supporting ongoing monitoring, investigation, and response as volumes and customer activity increased.
Results: Early detection, operational scale, and confident growth
Archer delivered over 200% ROI for Oxygen X over the initial deployment period, driven by early detection of high-risk activity and reduced downstream losses.
Over the first seven months of use, Oxygen X observed consistent results across fraud prevention, operations, and growth initiatives.
“Archer has consistently shown us patterns we wouldn’t have picked up otherwise,” said Dan Watts, Chief Risk Officer at Oxygen.
“Fraud in Nigeria doesn’t stand still, and a lot of the most harmful activity looks perfectly normal in isolation. What Archer has done well is surface coordinated behaviour early, which has allowed us to intervene before issues escalate rather than discovering them after the fact.”
Key outcomes include:
Sustained growth with strong risk controls
~4× revenue growth over a six-month period Oxygen X scaled customer activity and revenue from a low base while maintaining strong fraud controls.
Expansion of customer acquisition channels
Oxygen X introduced and scaled new digital and mobile channels alongside existing onboarding flows, supported by centralized risk visibility as volumes increased.
Fraud mitigation without sacrificing approvals
Fraud risk was mitigated without tightening restrictions on legitimate customers. Approval rates not only held steady but improved by ~5%, demonstrating that stronger fraud controls did not come at the expense of growth.
Operational efficiency at scale
The risk team supported higher volumes without increasing headcount, reducing investigation time per case through centralized workflows and improved behavioural visibility.
“With Archer in place, we’ve been able to grow without tightening the screws on good customers,”
Watts added.
“Approval rates have improved, the team spends less time chasing noise, and we’ve had the confidence to scale new digital and mobile channels knowing our risk controls are working. That balance has been important for us.”
Extending Archer across AML and compliance workflows
After consistent results in fraud prevention, Oxygen X began using Archer to support additional AML and compliance workflows, applying the same platform across a broader set of risk and regulatory use cases.
Rather than introducing a separate compliance system, Oxygen X extended its existing Archer deployment, consolidating fraud, AML, and compliance activity within a single operational framework as volumes and regulatory requirements evolved.
“At this point, Archer isn’t just a fraud tool for us,” Dan added. “Compared to other solutions we’ve seen in the market, it’s given us a level of visibility and control that’s much harder to maintain as the business grows and requirements evolve.”
Why Archer
Oxygen X selected Archer to establish a proactive fraud prevention capability aligned with the expectations placed on a regulated fintech operating within a large, systemically important financial group.
By embedding Archer early, Oxygen X put in place a risk foundation capable of anticipating evolving threats, supporting operational efficiency, and enabling the controlled rollout of new products and customer channels.
Archer supports Oxygen X with:
- Early identification of coordinated and emerging fraud behaviour
- Strong fraud mitigation without sacrificing approval rates
- Centralized fraud, AML, and compliance workflows
- Scalable infrastructure aligned with regulated fintech requirements
As Oxygen X continues to scale its operations, Archer remains a core component of its risk strategy, supporting sustainable growth in Nigeria’s high-velocity financial ecosystem.
Oxygen X Finance Company Ltd licensed by the Central Bank of Nigeria.
