Mopeli Lerotholi, CEO and Founder, Oricred
There’s a moment that never really left me.
A small business owner from Limpopo had won a major fencing contract, tens of millions of rands’ worth of work. On paper, it was a breakthrough. In reality, it was the beginning of a crisis. He had no capital, no financial backing, and no one willing to stand behind him.
So, he travelled to Boksburg by taxi and hitchhiking, carrying nothing but a brown envelope with his letter of award. Desperate to provide for his family, he was prepared to give up the contract at a fraction of its value, just to survive.
What stayed with me wasn’t just the scale of the contract. It was the contradiction.
Here was someone who had already proven himself capable enough to win the work yet still couldn’t access the funding to deliver it.
That moment forced a question I’ve been asking ever since:
Why must entrepreneurs prove themselves twice?
First to win the opportunity.
Then again to access the capital required to execute it.
Seeing the system from the inside
At the time, I was working inside formal banking. What struck me wasn’t that the problem was unfamiliar – senior people in the room acknowledged that this situation was common. What struck me was that no one saw it as a problem that needed solving.
The prevailing view was that this was a government issue. Or a compliance issue. Or simply the unfortunate cost of doing business in South Africa.
That’s when I realised something important: banks are not built for this problem.
They serve a purpose in society, and they do it well. But we’ve been led to believe that traditional financial institutions are designed to support development, inclusion, and emerging entrepreneurs. They aren’t. They create products, assess risk through narrow lenses, and deploy capital where trust already exists.
And in a country like ours – with its history, its inequalities, and its unfinished economic story – trust is not evenly distributed.
The cost of mistrust
When capital doesn’t flow, everything slows down.
In systems where money moves cautiously or not at all, capable people are locked out. You end up with engineers who should be building companies choosing instead to be employed, not because they lack ambition, but because they know they won’t be funded. You end up with procurement processes that create opportunity on paper, but vulnerability in practice.
Development doesn’t start with opportunity alone.
It starts with finance.
We often assume that if we give people work, they’ll ‘find a way.’ That assumption is flawed. There has to be alignment between the work that’s available and the financial capacity to deliver it. Without that, we’re setting people up to fail, and then blaming them when they do.
The irony is that this mistrust doesn’t serve anyone. Not government. Not corporates. Not the economy. And certainly not the entrepreneurs who are expected to build under impossible conditions.
Rethinking what trust actually means
When people hear that Oricred is willing to trust an SME before a bank does, they often assume that means we’re taking reckless risks. That couldn’t be further from the truth.
The difference is simple: we don’t fund businesses, we fund transactions.
If there is a credible purchase order from a reliable end-client, and a clear path to execution, that is a promise to pay. Traditional balance sheets often miss this entirely. They look backward, not forward. They measure history, not delivery.
Our role is to sit inside the transaction, not outside it. To understand what’s being built, how it’s being built, and where the risks actually lie. The lack of liquidity isn’t the risk. It’s the opportunity.
The gap no one wants to own
In South Africa, there’s a persistent disconnect between those who issue contracts and those who provide capital. Procurement and finance operate in parallel, rarely in partnership. As a result, contracts become pressure points instead of growth catalysts.
The private sector is slowly recognising this gap. Government, far less so.
Too often, policies are designed at a macro level by people who have never built a business, never chased cash flow, and never stood between payroll and survival. Without that lived understanding, policy falls short, not because of intent, but because of distance from reality.
In my view, no purchase order in a developmental country should exist without approved funding attached to it. Financing execution shouldn’t be optional infrastructure; it should be foundational.
What becomes possible when trust shifts
When trust is placed correctly, something powerful happens.
More people participate. The right people stay in the system. Those who are there to extract rather than build, are filtered out. Execution improves. Accountability improves. And over time, you start to build something we desperately need in this country – a strong, productive black middle class.
We talk a lot about transformation, but real transformation happens when capital circulates within communities – when businesses support professionals, suppliers, and services that look like them. When trust stops being the exception and becomes the default.
In a black-majority country, successful black-owned businesses should not be rare. The fact that they are tells us exactly where trust still sits.
Why this work stays personal
What keeps this work real for me isn’t balance sheets or deal sizes.
it’s the people who stop me in passing.
The entrepreneurs who tell me their school fees were overdue. Their cars were about to be repossessed. Their businesses were days from collapsing.
And then they got a chance.
What they do with that chance is up to them. But knowing we played a role in unlocking it, that’s what keeps me going. Because when you do work that’s rooted in purpose, it stops feeling like work.
I’ve seen what happens when trust is withheld.
I’ve also seen what becomes possible when it’s given.
And that difference is everything.