Adeshina Adewumi is an MB100 2021 Entrepreneur that is dedicated to leveraging technology to empower small retail enterprises in emerging economies with relation to Access to Market and Finance. Adeshina possesses both a postgraduate diploma in entrepreneurship from the Lagos Business School and a bachelor’s degree in accounting from Bowen University. His dedication to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 2030, particularly SDGs 1, 8, and 9, motivates him.
He served as a Partner with Aptive Capital, a US-based $1 million portfolio fund company committed to assisting entrepreneurs in capacity development and funding across Africa, with 7 portfolio companies receiving funding between 2020 and 2021. As an experienced entrepreneur, he recognizes that capacity development must meet the funding gap that exists in Africa.
Below are highlights of the interview conducted between World’s Leaders and Adeshina Adewumi:
Describe who you are as a person, inside and outside of the workplace.
Adeshina Adewumi is a goal getter who has a strong desire to die empty. At the age of 7, I had the opportunity to be exposed to the world of business. The opportunity came from a necessity to support my mother in her wholesale business with a massive retail network across Rivers State, Nigeria. By the age of 11, I was enrolled in the Nigerian Military School in Zaria, and that changed everything for me in terms of leadership, discipline, tenacity, resilience, and service for the greater good, which I embed as part of my personal and work culture today. For every action I take, I ask myself what value it adds to me, my people, and the wider community. This has greatly shaped my perception of what it means to live outside of just living, knowing that life is more than just me. Today, I am excited to be leading a fast-growing team committed to tackling global economic challenges like financial inclusion across emerging markets. Trade Lenda is indeed out on a mission to boost trade and commerce for businesses while championing the financial inclusion train.
Describe your background and what did you do before you started/joined the company?
I have a background in accounting by study, having completed my undergraduate study in accounting with a distinction I was opportune to champion innovation while learning operations, strategy and business development within the Stanbic IBTC Holdings (the Bank and Wealth Management subsidiaries) early on in my career journey. For those not familiar with Stanbic IBTC, this is actually a member of Standard Bank Group, and that gave me a global culture and mindset to work with. Stanbic IBTC has also notably produced lots of alumni leaders within Nigerian tech startups like Flutterwave, Paystack, and today, Trade Lenda. My work with Proville as the Pioneer Chief Operating Officer under the leadership of Blessing Ayemhere opened me to a new outlook on innovation and everyday challenges. While leading the Proville team, we were able to match African talents globally with users cutting across Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Canada, the United States, and various European countries. This built my confidence to want to do more, so in 2019 I founded One Kiosk, which later birthed Trade Lenda, where we help micro, small, and medium enterprises avoid missed opportunities and scale through timely access to credit while connecting them to various other partners to grow their sales and access to various other financial services. Today, we have access to over 240,000 MSMEs in Nigeria alone.
Tell us about the inception of the company. How did it all start?
I previously founded One Kiosk in 2019, so we observed the soar in users’ adoption of e-commerce channels due to the pandemic. Supporting over 14,000 MSMEs at the time and seeing gross merchandise value (GMV) grow from just less than $100,000 monthly to over $1 million showed the real potential of basic essential commodities and goods via e-commerce. However, as customer orders increased, these MSMEs struggled to keep up with the rising and corresponding growth.Could this be that MSMEs do not want to grow as fast as opportunities allow them to? A closer look and increased engagement led to the realization that most businesses were indeed unable access credit to grow, even when they showed the capacity or had invoices for some supplies that could increase their revenue potential. By 2021, we decided to put all our learnings together and form a team with experience cutting across the supply chain value chain, retail, credit, and technology to make a difference, and we have never looked back since then.
What has made you successful? What do you value?
The credit space is huge in Africa and across emerging markets with significant growth potential, so seeing the everyday impact and wins for the average businesses that we support is quite significant and what I call success. Our technology, however, has given these MSMEs the opportunity to live a better life, contribute meaningfully to economic growth, and go even further to create more jobs for the betterment of society.All of this while still being sustainable, with non-performing loans still under 3%, is highly commendable when compared to other players within the credit offering space in Nigeria.
What is the significance of innovative ideas in the company?
One of our innovative ideas is deeply rooted in our credit scoring framework, which helps us factor various multiples outside of the financial requirements most credit companies use in evaluating and underwriting credit requests from their users. This has stood us out among others so far.
Give us your opinion on; do organizations rely heavily on individual heroics or team processes?
For us at Trade Lenda, we believe in results, and as such, it’s a blend of both structured and unstructured paths to getting results. Every organization must have an unstructured path that allows for creativity and innovation to thrive on a continuous basis. For every successful innovation, processes and structures would then be put in place to ensure continuity and the desired outcome. So, I am a supporter of a blend of individual heroics and team processes at various times.
What are your responsibilities as the Founder/CEO of the company? What is the happiest part of your daily routine?
My responsibility as a founder and CEO of Trade Lenda is to attract the right people and resources to drive the vision of the company daily. My job is to get the right people on my boat, including users, employees, investors, partners, and a variety of other stakeholders required for a successful business.The happiest part of my job is seeing the company deliver value to every stakeholder on a daily basis. Customers and users have been supported, with employees working in a safe environment that helps them achieve their own goals while contributing to the organizational goal and delivering dividends of growth to investors and other partners.
What advice would you give someone going into a leadership position for the first time?
Learn and listen! Every position and platform are another opportunity to learn and re-learn. The day we stop learning is the day we die. The results successful leaders produce come from their ability to learn from and listen to those they lead. You are a leader not because you are the best at doing a specific job, but because it is perceived that you have the ability to coordinate multiple jobs through others to get the desired outcome. Learn and listen!
