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OPEYEMI KAREEM, in this feature, tells the story of how former British Army officer Wayne Hennessy-Barrett arrived in Kenya with little experience in finance and a simple question: what do small traders need to keep their businesses moving? Thirteen years later, that question has helped build 4G Capital into a lender that has disbursed more than $1bn in loans. Thirteen years ago, Wayne Hennessy-Barrett walked into Kenya’s informal markets with no bank, no loan book and, by his own admission, little conventional finance experience. He had one question for the traders he met: what did they need? The answers were remarkably simple. “I walked around and asked people what they needed,” he said. “They just said, I need a loan now to buy stuff and sell it.” That conversation would become the starting point for 4G Capital, the Kenya-based lender he would go on to build for micro and small businesses shut out of traditional finance. The problem was not that these businesses did not need money. They needed it constantly — to replenish stock, take advantage of a good buying opportunity or keep trading when cash was tied up elsewhere. But many had neither the collateral nor the financial records that banks typically demanded before lending. Hennessy-Barrett believed there was another way to decide who deserved credit. Instead of asking a small trader to prove their worth through assets or years of financial statements, 4G Capital would lend them working capital, watch how they repaid it and use that behaviour to determine how much they could borrow next. It was a simple idea, but one that would take the company from a $100 loan in its early days to more than $1bn in cumulative disbursements. In June, 4G Capital said it had disbursed more than $1bn across over seven million loans, while maintaining a repayment rate of about 95 per cent. The numbers are vastly different from where the company began. The underlying bet, however, has barely changed: that a small business does not necessarily need collateral to prove that it is creditworthy. Sometimes, it just needs the opportunity to demonstrate that it can repay. That bet began in 2013, when Hennessy-Barrett arrived in Kenya after working in the British Army and set out to build an unsecured lending business. Before he approved his first loan, he went looking for borrowers. He found them in the informal markets, walking from trader to trader and listening to what they said they needed. Building a lender on foot Before finance, there was the military. Hennessy-Barrett worked in the British Army, serving in conflict zones across the Balkans, the Middle East and South Asia. The experience left him with a conviction that communities emerging from conflict needed more than security. They needed jobs, functioning businesses and access to the capital required to build lives that could endure. After leaving the military, he joined a South African startup that sent him to East Africa to build an unsecured lending business from scratch. He arrived without the conventional finance background that might have seemed necessary for the job. Looking back, he believes that may have helped him. “Maybe I was lucky in not having a conventional finance background where I wouldn’t have been as receptive to that opportunity,” he said. So he started where the customers were. Hennessy-Barrett walked through Kenya’s bustling informal markets, speaking to traders and trying to understand what was missing from their businesses. “I walked around and asked people what they needed,” he said. “They just said, I need a loan now to buy stuff and sell it.” He explained that these responses informed 4G Capital’s first product: a $100 working-capital loan repayable over 30 days. To decide who qualified for a loan, Hennessy-Barrett told TechCabal that he built small field teams that moved from business to business through the market. Prospective borrowers answered about 40 questions, and their responses fed into a credit calculator to determine how much they could realistically borrow. Eighteen months after launching the operation, Hennessy-Barrett led a management buyout, allowing him to take ownership and begin trading as 4G Capital in 2015. 4G Capital merchants. Image source: 4G Capital Refining the idea For many startups, building a product the market wants is only the first step. Growth often brings the pressure to expand or pivot into other products. 4G Capital took a different approach. Instead, the company focused on improving the idea it started with. “We landed on a really good product-market fit with the first shot,” he said. As 4G Capital grew and issued more loans, it generated more data on users’ repayment habits. What started as the company’s credit calculator became Eva, Capital’s proprietary underwriting algorithm. Hennessy-Barrett explained the system analyses data points, including a business’s repayment history and seasonal trading patterns, to calculate how much it can responsibly borrow and how likely it is to repay. Today, Hennessy-Barrett said, the company’s underwriting process is almost entirely algorithmic. He also noted that in response to the realisation that many of its customers struggled with bookkeeping and stock management, which made it harder to grow their businesses or qualify for larger loans, 4G Capital introduced enterprise training alongside its lending. According to him, the goal was to help entrepreneurs build stronger businesses to improve repayment outcomes. As 4G Capital learned more about how goods moved between distributors and informal retailers, the company also introduced a supply-chain finance product. With this offering, distributors could receive immediate payment for goods supplied to retailers, while 4G Capital financed the transaction and collected repayment from the retailers over an agreed period. Still, Hennessy-Barrett said 4G Capital tested several new products over the years, but chose not to commercialise all of them. “We’ve had some very promising small product pilots… and we put them on ice because we’ve got so much to do with what we’re currently doing,” he said. The bet isn’t over The business Hennessy-Barrett built from conversations in Kenya’s informal markets has changed in scale.
Read MoreNigerians are putting more of their hard-earned money into the stock market than ever before. But what has that money actually earned them? Between January and May 2026, retail participation in the Nigerian Exchange (NGX) grew by 138.76% year-on-year, with ₦2.86 trillion ($2.13 billion) in equities traded. Much of the renewed interest in the market has coincided with a strong run in banking stocks, as investors bet on what newly recapitalised banks can earn from their larger balance sheets. But the rally has not rewarded every bank investor equally. A ₦100,000 ($74.43) investment in First HoldCo at the start of 2026 would have become ₦269,000 ($200.21) by August 26, while the same investment in UBA would be worth just ₦106,000 ($78.89). Between March 2024 and March 2026, Nigerian banks raised ₦3.37 trillion ($2.51 billion) in fresh capital from domestic investors. Much of that capital has gone into the country’s biggest lenders, including Access Holdings Plc, Guaranty Trust Holding Company Plc (GTCO), United Bank for Africa (UBA), First HoldCo Plc, and Zenith Bank. With fresh capital, these banks now have greater capacity to grow their loan books, expand payments and other fee-generating businesses, and compete for larger corporate and retail opportunities. Investors are betting that stronger earnings will translate into higher share prices and dividends. So, how much would ₦100,000 ($74.43) invested in each of the five banks at the start of the year be worth now? Methodology: The calculations use each stock’s first trading price of 2026 and its August 26 price. They measure share-price appreciation only and exclude dividends, brokerage fees, taxes, and other transaction costs. What your investment became Share-price performance from January to August 26, 2026. Dividends and fees excluded. Your starting investment ₦ ₦50k ₦100k ₦500k ₦1m Original Investment Gain ‘; rowsHtml += ‘ ‘; rowsHtml += ‘ ‘; rowsHtml += ‘ ‘; rowsHtml += ‘ ‘; rowsHtml += ‘ ‘; rowsHtml += ‘ ‘; rowsHtml += ‘
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In partnership with Lire en Français اقرأ هذا باللغة العربية TGIFLUTW. Several companies are hiring this week, including critical local roles at Tether, Paystack, and Flutterwave. Head over to our updated job board. Let’s get into today’s newsletter. Become smarter about tech and commerce in Francophone Africa, and the policies shaping them. Read previous editions here first and subscribe below. Subscribe Quizzes OPay reportedly eyes the NGX Coronation sells part of its SPAR stake Who secured the bag? World Wide Web 3 Job Openings Quizzes How closely did you read TC Daily this week? One question, tap an answer. Nigeria’s FCCPC gave MTN conditional approval for its $2.2 billion IHS Towers acquisition this week. What’s the condition? A) MTN must cut its tower prices by 30% B) MTN must sell up to 30% of its IHS Nigeria stake to local investors C) MTN must divest from IHS entirely within five years D) MTN must share network data with Airtel and T2 Mobile Every business owner needs to watch this. The business questions you Google, answered by experts. Watch for free. companies OPay could bring its $4 billion IPO ambitions to the Nigerian Exchange Image Source: Tenor OPay, the Nigeria-focused fintech famous for its lightning-speed transfers and green army of point-of-sale (PoS) devices, has spent months preparing for a big debut on the American capital market. Now, in a slightly unexpected turn, the company may also be preparing to sell shares to investors back home through the Nigerian Exchange (NGX). It is unclear whether OPay could list exclusively in Nigeria or pursue a dual listing. What happened? According to local publication Nairametrics, OPay could be planning to list its shares on the NGX, though the company has not officially confirmed the plans. The timing, size of the offer, and number of shares it could sell are still unknown. Explain like I’m new here: In May, Bloomberg reported that OPay was planning a US public listing, seeking a valuation of $4 billion. At the end of 2025, Opera, one of its key investors, held a 9.5% stake in OPay which was worth $294.6 million, implying a $3.10 billion valuation. At the end of Q2 2026, that investment had grown to $300.9 million in fair-value gain, showing that OPay’s valuation has ticked up slightly to $3.17 billion. If the $4 billion valuation ask goes according to plan, OPay’s listing would considerably grow its current $3.17 billion worth. Sugar rush? The fintech’s performance is also drawing investor and potential stakeholder interest. In August, Bloomberg reported that Standard Group, South Africa’s largest lender, was in talks to acquire an OPay stake before it goes public. Temi Popoola, chief executive officer of NGX, earlier this month urged the Nigerian President to require Nigerian fintechs to list on the stock exchange, pointing out that companies such as OPay and PalmPay, which operate mainly in Nigeria, are considering foreign public listings. However, it is too soon to know whether that appeal affected OPay’s plans, especially without the fintech explicitly confirming its reported plans to list on the NGX. Why the NGX might look interesting: In the first seven months of 2026, the NGX’s All-Share Index (which tracks the performance of NGX-listed stocks) rose by 57%. By the end of July, the total value of those companies jumped by ₦58.9 trillion ($43.8 billion) to ₦158.2 trillion ($117.8 billion). The surge and strong NGX performance could convince fintechs such as OPay that there is deep market participation and local capital to tap if they look in that direction. Moonshot is back! Moonshot 2026 is coming! Join us at the National Theatre, Lagos on October 28 & 29 for two days of tech and innovation. Grab your early bird tickets now and get 15% off. companies Coronation trims its SPAR stake by more than $6.3 million Image Source: BusinessTech Coronation Asset Management, a South African asset manager that also operates in Nigeria, has sold over R100 million ($6.3 million) worth of shares in SPAR, but it has not walked away from the South African retailer. What happened? Coronation, an institutional investor in SPAR, sold part of its beneficial interest in the company. Following the sale, its stake has decreased from 10.89% to 9.53%, according to itscorporate filing on Thursday. Based on SPAR’s roughly 192.6 million issued shares, that is about 2.62 million shares. At SPAR’s share price around the time of the announcement,the sale was worth about R104 million to R105 million ($6.52 million–$6.58 million). Explain like I’m new here: Coronation manages money for clients, so it can buy or sell part of its stake in a listed company without exiting its entire position. The fund manager still owns about 18.36 million SPAR shares, making it one of the retailer’s biggest institutional shareholders. The sale does not signal a full exit, but it shows that Coronation is willing to trim its position even as it remains a major shareholder. State of play: Coronation’s stake reduction is roughly one in every eight SPAR shares it previously held. The original disclosure puts the sale at more than R100 million (about $6.26 million) at the same exchange rate. South African government-owned fund, the Public Investment Corporation (PIC), remains SPAR’s largest institutional shareholder with about 18.63%, followed by Allan Gray, a local investment company, with about 8.53%. Zoom out: Coronation’s sale is not necessarily a vote of no confidence in SPAR, as it still holds a significant stake in the company. The more useful signal is whether Coronation keeps trimming its SPAR stake, starts buying again, or holds its 9.53% position. insights Funding Tracker Image Source: TechCabal Insights Swvl, an Egyptian mobility startup, raised $13 million in strategic investment from Coefficient LP. (Aug 26) Here are the other deals for the week: Verascient, a South African AI-infrastructure company, raised $1.5 million in a pre-seed funding round from Founder Collective, Andrena Ventures, Cambridge Enterprise, and Summit Ventures. (Aug 24) Flowt, a Kenyan fintech startup, raised an undisclosed amount in pre-seed funding from Delta40 Fund I,
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