Former British soldier builds a $1 billion lending business in Kenya

Wayne Hennessy-Barrett arrived in Kenya in 2013 with little experience in finance and no loan book to speak of. What he did have was a question for the small traders he met in the country’s informal markets: what do you need? The answer was simple. “I walked around and asked people what they needed,” Hennessy-Barrett said. “They just said, I need a loan now to buy stuff and sell it.” For many of the traders, the issue was not finding customers. It was having enough money to buy stock and keep the business going. Traditional banks were often not an option. Many small businesses did not have the collateral or financial records banks typically require before approving a loan. Hennessy-Barrett decided to try something different.

He would lend traders small amounts, see how they managed the money and use their repayment history when deciding whether to lend to them again. The first loans were around $100 and had to be repaid within 30 days. That business eventually became 4G Capital.In June 2026, the Kenyan lender said it had disbursed more than $1 billion across more than seven million loans since it started. It said around 95% of its loans are repaid. The average loan is still only around $120 to $130.

Hennessy-Barrett’s route into lending

Before he got into finance, Hennessy-Barrett was in the British Army. He served in conflict zones across the Balkans, the Middle East and South Asia. After leaving the military, he joined a South African startup and was sent to East Africa to build an unsecured lending operation. He said not having a conventional finance background may actually have helped. “Maybe I was lucky in not having a conventional finance background where I wouldn’t have been as receptive to that opportunity,” he said. Rather than starting with a traditional banking model, he went into the markets and spoke to traders.

The conversations helped shape the first lending product. 4G Capital’s field teams would go from business to business to assess potential borrowers. Customers answered around 40 questions about their businesses, with the information fed into a credit calculator that determined how much they could borrow. The amounts were deliberately small. The idea was to give a trader enough money to buy stock without putting them under too much pressure to repay. Around 18 months after the operation launched, Hennessy-Barrett led a management buyout. The company began trading as 4G Capital in 2015.

The data changed how it lent

The more loans 4G Capital issued, the more information it collected about its customers. Repayment history became particularly useful. A customer who had borrowed and repaid several times could demonstrate their ability to handle more credit. That information eventually became the basis for Eva, 4G Capital’s proprietary underwriting algorithm. Hennessy-Barrett said Eva looks at factors such as repayment history and seasonal trading patterns to determine how much a customer can borrow and how likely they are to repay. The company’s underwriting process is now almost entirely algorithmic.

Customers who have built up several years of repayment history can borrow up to $2,000, compared with the roughly $100 loans offered when the business started. 4G Capital has also introduced supply-chain finance. Under this model, distributors can receive payment immediately for goods they supply to retailers, while 4G Capital finances the transaction and collects repayment from the retailer over an agreed period. The average loan for this part of the business is around $400.

Not every idea made it

As 4G Capital grew, it also found that some of its customers needed more than working capital. Bookkeeping and stock management were problems for some of the small businesses it served. The company added enterprise training to help customers manage their businesses better. It has also tested other products over the years, although not all of them went ahead. “We’ve had some very promising small product pilots,” Hennessy-Barrett said. Some were put on hold because the company still has plenty of room to grow its existing business.

A small part of a much bigger market

4G Capital has now disbursed more than $1 billion, but the company has reached only a fraction of Kenya’s small-business market. The country has an estimated 7.2 million micro, small and medium-sized enterprises. 4G Capital has served just under 800,000 of them. The financing gap is also substantial. The International Finance Corporation estimates that Kenyan businesses face a $19.3 billion financing gap. For Hennessy-Barrett, that means there is still a lot of room for the lender to grow. The business he started by walking through informal markets is now processing millions of loans, but the basic customer has not changed much. A trader still needs money to buy stock. The difference is that 4G Capital now has years of data to decide how much that trader can borrow. “We have barely begun, really,” Hennessy-Barrett said.