Kelvin Obasuyi learned entrepreneurship by failing at almost everything first

Kelvin Obasuyi says his mother used to tell him that there is dignity in labour. It is a piece of advice that has guided him through years of work that rarely looked dignified from the outside: a chocolate popcorn business that folded within a year, selling varsity jackets, and freelance data analysis for anyone willing to pay. 

“I was [doing] anything I could do for money,” he says.

Years later, as an entrepreneur, his mother’s words stopped being about his own survival and became about everyone else’s.

“People [who] work for me are depending on the business to feed families,” he says. “That gave me a different idea about what entrepreneurship means to me.”

Today, that idea runs through two companies. Obasuyi is the co-founder at 56 Capital, a finance firm lending to informal African businesses, and chief executive of Vector Innovations, a cross-border fintech company.

None of it was mapped out when he had just graduated from the university. 

ChopChat and economies of scale

In July 2013, Obasuyi graduated with an Economics degree from  Covenant University, a private university in Ogun State, southwestern Nigeria. 

In November of the same year, Obasuyi began his National Youth Service Corps (NYSC), Nigeria’s mandatory one-year post-graduation programme. To make ends meet during the period, he launched his first business venture.

“It was a very difficult time for me,” he says, “So, I wanted to make more money”.

The venture he pursued was ChopChat, a chocolate-flavoured popcorn business. 

“This [venture] also made me love business,” he recalls. “We sold [ChopChat] stands at Iyana Ipaja Bus Stop [in Lagos], and we sold at some plazas.”

Broke and living in Lagos with a group of friends, Obasuyi realised their combined savings could cover a popcorn machine and ingredients. 

The business, however, folded in 2014.   

“As demand grew, we simply weren’t equipped to produce 500 packs a day by hand from a single machine,” he reveals. “Our labour was a handful of friends who later took up jobs and could no longer help, and we had no access to finance to invest in bigger equipment or more hands”.

In the same year, Obasuyi rounded up his NYSC, but was unable to get a job.
“Even though I finished from Covenant University, a top school, it was still very difficult to land some jobs,” he says. “And I think I was also very picky [about] what I wanted to do”

He says he wanted to land a banking job. When he could not get the roles, what followed, between 2014 and 2017, was a stretch of freelance work. He says he sold varsity jackets, marketed American career-guidance software to secondary schools, and ran data analytics jobs.

Looking back, he says the period taught him the value of grit. Theory alone, he learned, does not survive contact with the real business world. It also sharpened his emotional intelligence: reading what people are not saying out loud to close a sale. 

“Vocal communication is less than a third of what’s actually being communicated,” he says. “The rest you have to read.” 

He also credits the stretch with teaching him how to keep moving without the structure of a salary, and how to keep evolving in tough terrain. 

“If you don’t, competition simply wipes you out,” he says. “Those are lessons the comfort of a bank job could never have given me.” 

Learning banking from the inside

Obasuyi says in 2017,  he joined Guaranty Trust Bank (GTBank), one of Nigeria’s leading commercial banks, in a marketing role. He spent two years there.

“[Working at GTBank] taught me grit,” he says. “People have this funny idea that when you go to a private school, you are a bit lily-livered, but GTBank exposed me to toughness”.

He recalls joining the marketing team at the time when the bank’s goal was to capture the youth population.

“We had ambitious targets given to us,” he recalls. “They didn’t mind what school you went to; you just had to get the job done.”

He also recognises his time there as a period that taught him market segmentation— that not every market can be served the same way. 

“I realised that the banks couldn’t serve the unstructured financial markets, even though the unstructured financial markets are making a lot of money,” he says.

It was at GTBank, watching customers get turned away for lacking formal financial records, that the seed of an idea began to form.

In February 2018, while at GTBank, he says he recalls a woman who came in seeking a loan to fund her laundry business but lacked the formal documentation the bank required. She was turned down.

“It was right to refuse because the bank was a structured organisation,” he says.

That experience stayed with him and made him think about starting his own business that catered to unstructured businesses. But the idea would take years to take shape. First, there was more banking left to learn.  

Obasuyi says that in 2019, he joined Stanbic IBTC Bank, another commercial bank, as a business analyst. 

“Stanbic, being a global bank, strengthened my understanding of financial instruments, financial markets, and corporate businesses,” he says.

At Stanbic, he also learned what it meant to work within a system that was “bureaucratic” for a reason. People would often complain about how long it took to get anything done, but he says he came to understand the delays were rooted in compliance, not rigidity for its own sake.

“I learned how to guard operational systems, business systems, and systems thinking,” he adds.

In 2020, Obasuyi left Stanbic IBTC to join First Bank of Nigeria, the country’s oldest bank, as a Product Manager. 

He was in charge of robotics process automation (RPA), which uses automation technologies to perform repetitive office tasks of human workers, such as extracting data, filling in forms, moving files, and more.

“I learned what it means to do a corporate turnaround,” he recalls. “How do you convince an old, established bank that you can employ some form of artificial intelligence in their system?”

He says he saw the corporate transformation team push hard to automate more than 100 processes across the bank, across the different departments of the bank, and across different countries.

He left First Bank in November 2022, having picked up stakeholder management and what he calls change management skills as a project manager.

After his departure, he started thinking. The idea that had been building since his GTBank days—that Nigeria’s small businesses were underserved because they did not fit the banks’ risk models—finally became a company.

In February 2023, the idea became 56 Capital, the finance firm he founded to provide debt and equity financing to both structured and unstructured African businesses.

“Businesses are like human beings; they have different pain points,” he explains. And that is where 56 Capital comes in. We understand you, and we build something that works for you while complying with international standards.”

Oxford and the birth of a new business

In September 2023, while still running 56 Capital, Obasuyi received the Oxford Black Leaders Scholarship for a Master of Business Administration (MBA) at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, in England.

He describes his Oxford education as valuable. Sitting alongside over 330 students from over 50 countries, as he puts it, taught him to “pick up cues they were not taught in school.”

He pushes back on the idea that MBAs are overrated, arguing that people often go in expecting the degree to hand them something purely academic, without realising its real value lies in the life skills it teaches. 

The scepticism surrounding MBA degrees is not unfounded. A report has shown that MBA graduates from foreign universities, including Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, often struggle to find jobs. Another report mentions MBA graduates from Harvard as having the same fate.

For him, that was the most important thing he took from the programme, along with the exposure that came from it, including his admission into the school’s accelerator programme, Creative Destruction Lab. 

Oxford, he says, taught him how to navigate international communication and business, a skill that has shaped how Vector Innovations operates today. Working with stakeholders across Taiwan, Singapore, and the UK, he says, “you need to understand emotional intelligence. You need to understand the right things to say. You need to understand balance.”

He believes it takes more than technical knowledge to succeed in the industry, describing the unwritten cues of international business as things “not taught in school.”

After completing his MBA in 2024, Obasuyi joined Duplo, a Nigerian cross-border payments and enterprise resource planning company, as senior product manager. He stayed just over a year, leaving in February 2026.

Duplo, he says, gave him a strong technical grounding in financial technology. Coming straight out of his MBA, he had to relearn how to do gritty, hands-on work and to stay flexible rather than rigid. 

“As a tech organisation, you have to know how to survive and thrive by changing direction when the situation demands it,” he says.

Above all, he says, Duplo taught him the full cycle of building, deploying, and winning in a market that never stops shifting 

Two months later, in April 2026, he founded Vector Innovations, a cross-border payments and stablecoin fintech, where he now serves as chief executive officer and co-founder. 

Running the business, he says, has already taught him lessons of its own. He had drafted a specific identity for Vector: competitive rates, wider country coverage. But when clients described the company back to him, they mentioned something else entirely: Vector treats business as a relationship and delivers fast. 

“Your most powerful witness is the customer,” he says. “They are your testament of truth to who you claim to be.” 

The second lesson, he says, is to fail forward and stay ambitious. 

It is also, in his telling, where Vector Innovations is headed next. He wants the company to expand into more countries

“I want to meet everybody at their pain points in the next ten years,” he says. 

True scale demands moving beyond surface-level integrations to robust execution. We’ve filtered the noise out of Moonshot 2026, optimising the conference strictly for high-calibre connections between startup founders, global financial operators, enterprise leaders and individuals rewiring Africa’s technical frameworks.

Get 20% off Early Bird tickets for a limited time.