Hello Thrivers,

In today’s THRIVE Influencer, we spotlight Kelvin Obasuyi, founder of 56 Capital, a financial growth partner focused on businesses within Africa’s informal sector.

Kelvin’s approach to financing began while he worked at GTBank, watching small entrepreneurs walk into a bank looking for relatively modest amounts of money and leave without it.

Instead of spending his entire salary, he lived on a portion of it and began lending the rest to small businesses that traditional financial institutions were unlikely to fund. More importantly, he did not simply hand them money and walk away.

That early experiment eventually became 56 Capital.

Today, Kelvin is trying to build something broader than a lending business: a financial system that understands informal entrepreneurs, helps them structure their businesses, connects them to customers and suppliers, and grows with them as their needs become more sophisticated.

Let’s hear from Kelvin.

I started my career at GTBank, but before then, I had tried several businesses myself. I sold varsity jackets, worked in data analysis, and even built a chocolate popcorn business.

After university, some friends and I came together and decided we wanted to make money through business. It sounded exciting until we actually started.

That experience showed me how difficult running a business could be, particularly when you were young and still figuring things out. Some of the businesses worked and gave us enough money to live on, but eventually I decided it was time to take a 9-to-5 job, which was how I entered banking.

While working at the bank, I watched people come in looking for loans and get rejected because their businesses were too unstructured.

Imagine a woman trying to start or expand a laundry business being asked for audited financial statements. By the time she pays someone to prepare all those documents, a significant part of the money she needs for the business is already gone.

That stayed with me because my mother had been involved in fishery and poultry, so I already understood that informal businesses could make real money.

I began thinking, what if the issue was not that these businesses had no value, but that traditional institutions were simply not designed to assess them properly?

At the time, I was earning roughly ₦180,000 to ₦200,000. I started living on about 40% of my salary and using the rest to provide credit to small, unstructured businesses.

That became the raw idea behind 56 Capital.

I would not necessarily say banks do not understand informal businesses. They do.

The difference is that these businesses are not always their core market, and traditional banking has largely been designed around financial return first.

At 56 Capital, we approach it differently. We think about the business first and believe that if we create enough value for the business, the financial return follows.

We try to understand the individual business.

You could have ten businesses selling the same product, but they may have completely different problems. One may need help with operations, another may have a pricing problem, while someone else may need better people management.

The second thing is relationships.

There have been situations where customers owed several people at the same time, but they would tell us, “I’m going to pay you first because I don’t want to spoil our relationship.”

That taught me something important about credit.

Sometimes repayment is not simply about whether someone has money. It is also about priority, trust, and the relationship that has been built.

Since we started, our default rate has remained around 2%, and even within that percentage, some customers are not saying they will never repay. They are asking us to restructure the credit and extend the repayment period.

That relationship is a major part of how we operate.

“Everybody gives money. With us, it has to be beyond money.”

We are largely industry agnostic.

We have financed businesses across hospitality, fashion, food, education, and other sectors. We have even financed microfinance institutions that provide credit to market women.

For us, one of the most important considerations is the character of the person behind the business.

We learned that lesson during the early days of 56 when we provided money to people whose character we should probably have questioned more closely, and some of that money disappeared.

We also look at whether the entrepreneur has skin in the game. Someone may approach us saying they are passionate about starting a business, but if they have invested nothing of their own into it despite having the ability to do so, we become cautious.

Cash flow is extremely important.

You can be operating in a legitimate industry, but if the business does not generate consistent cash flow, there is a greater risk of default and eventually a greater risk to the business itself.

Another major consideration is whether the entrepreneur has separated the business from themselves financially. We look at bank statements, petty cash records, and how money moves through the company.

If there is no separation, we help them understand how to create one.

Sometimes we will tell someone, make these changes and come back in three to six months. If nothing has improved by then, we may decide not to provide credit because we already know where the money is likely to go.

But our work has gradually moved beyond evaluating businesses individually.

We are also building what we call a closed-circuit economy among businesses within the 56 network.

Imagine we finance a company that processes rice, another that distributes it, and another that sells it. Instead of treating those businesses separately, we can introduce them to one another.

That is what we mean when we say the work is beyond money.

At 56 Capital, we have a research and education function focused on helping people understand these things in practical ways.

We are also building initiatives such as My Money and I, designed around teaching people how to structure their finances and operate their businesses better.

But we also understand that we cannot directly teach everyone.

That is one reason we have financed smaller microfinance institutions and other organisations already specialising in serving market women and similar communities.

Running 56 Capital taught me to pay attention to where money goes after a business receives it.

If someone sells plastic products, where are the raw materials coming from? If another company begins expanding, what happens when they need to import products or pay suppliers outside Nigeria?

That thinking eventually contributed to the creation of Vector Innovations, a cross-border payment company.

The idea was simple: if 56 helps a company grow from a small informal business into something much larger, why should our relationship end when that company begins operating internationally?

I see financial products almost like a life cycle. Your needs change as you grow, and I want our ecosystem to be able to move with you instead of abandoning you once you reach a new stage.

Humility.

We do not celebrate informal businesses enough.

People pay attention when a company becomes a unicorn or when the founder becomes extremely wealthy, but thousands of smaller entrepreneurs are just as ambitious and hardworking. Sometimes what separates them is opportunity, timing, or access to the right person.

Business contains an element of luck that people do not always like to acknowledge.

Someone meets the right person, enters the right market at the right time or receives one opportunity that completely changes the trajectory of the company.

It has also taught me patience.

There is a major obsession with fast money right now. Everyone wants to make an extraordinary return within a very short period, but meaningful businesses take time to build.

56 itself started from part of my salary. Today, our assets under management exceed ₦3 billion, but that growth required patience.

I have also received some of the most valuable advice of my life from people whom society might not consider financially successful.

We often judge wisdom based on net worth, and I have learned that this can be a terrible mistake.

“You have to be humble enough to know that these people have what it takes to expand and grow.”

The informal sector and MSMEs play an enormous role in our economies, so support cannot come from the private sector alone.

There needs to be stronger collaboration between government and private institutions, and that support has to go beyond simply announcing that a certain amount of money has been distributed.

Entrepreneurs need education, structures, follow-up, and systems that measure what happens after the money has been given.

If a business receives funding, what milestone is expected next? What did the entrepreneur achieve with the first tranche before another one is released? Who is helping that business connect to suppliers, manufacturers, or customers?

Those things matter.

We also need more patient capital.

Our economies do not always have the luxury of waiting many years for a business to mature, but some businesses need exactly that kind of time and support.

Private financial institutions and development finance institutions are already contributing, but I believe there is still room to build much stronger systems around informal businesses.

The ambition is much larger than Nigeria.

We want to replicate what we are doing in Nigeria across other African markets and continue strengthening informal businesses until many of them grow into much larger companies.

Success would be seeing businesses that started small expand into companies employing dozens or hundreds of people.

We have already seen examples of that.

Since starting in 2023, we have directly supported roughly 125 businesses. When you include the companies and entrepreneurs reached indirectly through institutions we finance, particularly microfinance institutions, that number becomes much larger.

But I still do not think we have done enough.

Kelvin Obasuyi began 56 Capital with a simple observation: the fact that a business cannot satisfy the requirements of a traditional bank does not automatically mean it is a bad business.

Sometimes the records are incomplete. Sometimes the company is still too small. Sometimes the entrepreneur does not yet know how to separate personal money from business income. And sometimes, what that person needs is not another rejection but someone willing to understand the business well enough to know what can be fixed.

The laundry entrepreneur without audited accounts may eventually build a large company. The trader running an unstructured operation may become an employer of hundreds. The entrepreneur who appears small today may simply be waiting for the right combination of capital, knowledge, patience and opportunity.

Perhaps that is the most interesting thing about 56 Capital.

It is not simply asking, “Can this business repay a loan?”

It is also asking, “What could this business become if somebody helped it grow properly?”

Click here to learn more about Kelvin Obasuyi and his work in the finance capital space.

Team Thrive

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