A recent post on Twitter said that most workers cannot explain where all their monies go, and the post did get a lot of “very true!” reactions. People work for years without having any savings or accumulated assets to justify the time. This is the reason Riby Finance set out to help people create and preserve wealth.
Abolore Salami, Founder and Partner at Riby Finance was present on the Nairametrics Business Half Hour, where he recounted that the company had been borne out of the observation that people needed guidance and help in creating and preserving wealth, otherwise they would keep putting off their financial plans in anticipation of some big bonus, or raise.
“A couple of years ago, I was working in a media company and one of the things I noticed was that it was difficult to create wealth as an employee. We are always waiting for this big bonus, or extra allowance before executing their wealth creation plan. My worry was, if people working in a company might never get rich, what’s the fate of those who are not? That was the idea behind Riby Finance. Either as a salary earner or a small business owner, there needs to be a path to people getting rich. It might be a better pension system, better saving system; whatever it is, I was resolved to find it and that path led to the launch of Riby,” Salami explained.
Riby Finance started operations in May 2016, structured as a B2C and B2B model. Riby first launched a savings platform with the catchphrase: Plan. Save. Invest. Cooperate. Since Riby was not a bank licensed to hold money, this platform was targeted at groups and cooperatives that were allowed to hold money.
This part of Riby Finance provides a digital platform in Nigeria for cooperatives and trade groups to create wealth which would in turn translate into prosperous communities. Targeting these groups is part of a larger plan to reach out to the underbanked and unbanked, and support them to earn liveable income, develop a lifestyle of savings and wealth creation, and ultimately own a home. Millions of users are subscribed to the Riby Cooperatives Banking solution and taking advantage of this service.
On another hand, Riby Finance provides digital solutions and financial services to help individuals and businesses better capture data, maintain and grow their finances. They also partner with some of these institutions, both private and public, to build and customise digital solutions to suit their needs.
“Preservation of wealth is as important as creating wealth and a lot of companies are in that line helping people to save and invest regardless of whether they have a large account to get a finance manager. We also build technology for these companies to automate the process of wealth creation and related stuffs,” Salami noted.
At five years of operations, Riby is now largely revenue-funded, even though it has attracted partners and investors, and raised funds over the years. Customer base has also grown rapidly in the last couple of years.
At the core of the founders’ vision is empowering people to be wealthy enough to own their own homes. Where people live in shoddy homes and pay ridiculous amounts in rents, they can hardly gather sufficient funds to build sustainable wealth.
“The vision is that as a group and a business, we can support millions of people to get access to credit facilities, get the home they want and build the wealth they want. In the next ten years, We should have millions of people who will be able to say confidently that they have created wealth for one generation,” Salami stated.
