The spectacular collapse of African Bank Investments (Abil) in August 2014 remains one of the defining corporate failures in modern South African financial history. At the centre of this shock stood Leon Kirkinis, the charismatic founding CEO who spent decades building a consumer finance behemoth.
Ultimately, the institution buckled under the weight of nonperforming unsecured loans, a disastrous retail acquisition, and what an official inquiry would later term executive hubris.
Yet, from the ashes of this failure, Kirkinis has quietly engineered a highly strategic return to the credit markets via his fintech company, UsPlus. Today, he and his team of 12 operate out of a low-key office above a pizza shop in Greenside, Joburg — a stark contrast to the towering corporate monolith of African Bank’s Midrand headquarters.
Launched in 2015, UsPlus Ltd positions itself as a specialised alternative financier with a developmental mandate. It is a complete pivot from the lending model of African Bank, and instead features short-term, secured invoice factoring for SMMEs. Eleven years in, UsPlus is thriving. It has become a highly profitable, structurally sound financial engine.
Kirkinis had long championed financial inclusion and support for SMEs. This stemmed from his childhood, when his father was a shopkeeper. Closing his chapter at African Bank left him with the time and space to come up with something new, with the clarity of hindsight. UsPlus was born from a desire to truly make a difference.
“I needed to do something different, to start over again. I finally had the opportunity to do what I like, which is developing our society,” says Kirkinis. “With my experiences, I learnt a lot about what I like and what works, and what I don’t like and what doesn’t work.”
Chief among those lessons was the danger of corporate bloating and the loss of an in-person culture. UsPlus was designed from inception to be lean and agile. FD Gary Sayers emphasises this intentional structural resilience. “We are a low-cost business which provides a cushion for shocks and disappointments when they happen,” he says.
This lean approach allows the company to pursue a genuine ESG mandate without sacrificing profitability. UsPlus targets businesses that contribute to employment retention, reindustrialisation, poverty alleviation and rural development, with a particular focus on black-owned, women-led and youth-run enterprises. For Kirkinis and his team, the marriage of profit and purpose is non-negotiable.
This democratisation of technology allowed UsPlus to act as a highly agile bridge. Rather than building a heavy, branch-reliant infrastructure, the company could leverage digital platforms to seamlessly connect institutional capital with the working capital requirements of SMMEs.
“In a new business, you have the benefit of hindsight in a changing environment where technology is democratic, cheaper and faster. The sharing economy now allows people with surpluses and deficits to connect more efficiently than ever before,” says Kirkinis.
“You can only have a positive social impact if you’re sustainable,” he argues. “The only way you can be sustainable is if you generate returns that investors are happy with, while maintaining your core social impact goals.”
Generating those sustainable returns, however, requires a new kind of business model. Inside the Greenside office, the “L-word” is banned when you do invoice discounting, says Sayers. “We do not hand out loans. We purchase self-liquidating instruments.”
The company functions exclusively as a B2B alternative financier, providing working capital to SMMEs by purchasing their approved invoices, purchase orders and specific contracts. UsPlus operates on highly compressed working capital cycles, with a typical duration of just 35 days and rarely exceeding 60 days.
UsPlus also avoids the physical collateral trap that restricts traditional commercial banks. Ryan Cameron, an executive at the company, points out that traditional banks only want to lend against tangible assets. “We quite like an IP-rich, asset-light world. If I am going to lend against Gary’s brain, who happens to be a CFO, it’s a bit of a challenge,” says Cameron.
This IP-rich philosophy and the mission of financial inclusion are best illustrated by the path of a young advocate. Becoming an advocate is financially tough. Aspiring practitioners must complete a year of pupillage, essentially working for free, only to face a subsequent wait of 95 days or more for their first invoices to be settled.
“There is a huge gap here,” Cameron says, noting that while the money will be paid by reputable firms, many brilliant young advocates simply cannot afford that first year of free labour. UsPlus steps in to bridge this gap, recognising the “brain” as the asset and the invoice as the security.
Through the discounting of invoices against against verifiable revenue streams generated by service-based SMEs, creatives and professionals, UsPlus relies on the 80/20 principle, says Cameron. The idea is to find and fund the 20% of high-impact entrepreneurs who will generate 80% of the growth. This keeps the portfolio lean. “We have fewer than 200 clients, and yet we’ve been able to scale on that basis,” says Cameron.
The company deliberately chooses not to advertise its services, as this would result in fielding hundreds of calls from people who do not understand what it does. Sifting through mass inquiries from people looking for traditional loans, rather than invoice factoring, wastes time and resources. Instead, the team focuses on loyalty and operational efficiency.
Risk-taking is a melting pot of science and art. It can’t be all science, and it can’t be all art
— Leon Kirkinis
Risky business
Because the legal structure is a purchase and sale, the traditional banking metric of a nonperforming loan does not technically apply. However, risk remains the central pillar of the operation. “Risk-taking is a melting pot of science and art. It can’t be all science, and it can’t be all art,” says Kirkinis.
The “science” is handled by proprietary automated scorecards and accounting integrations that rapidly evaluate the financial robustness of the client. The “art” relies on human judgment and stringent mechanical safeguards.
Sayers explains that UsPlus conducts only disclosed discounting, which means informing the customer’s debtor that the company has purchased the instrument from them; therefore, they would need to pay UsPlus. By taking direct control of the cash flow from the larger corporate debtor, UsPlus significantly drops the inherent risk of SME funding. It then tracks “invoices at risk” — monitoring if the timing of a collection veers off its expected schedule.
But perhaps the starkest contrast to faceless, algorithm-driven mass lending is UsPlus’s face-to-face culture. It mandates physical site visits before getting on board, and if a crisis hits, it doesn’t immediately send in the liquidators.
“We’ll give them a call instead,” says Kirkinis. “We then determine if this was a bad luck one-off incident, or if this was in bad faith.”
The pandemic was the ultimate loyalty test. “Consider a Covid-type scenario, where a client supplying the motor industry sees that industry shut down for three months. What is he supposed to do?” Kirkinis asks. This empathetic strategy has led to loyal and strong business relationships with clients being built up over the years. “We didn’t lose a single client through Covid.”
We’re the guys running into the burning building, and the bankers are the ones running out
— Ryan Cameron
“We plug into the heartbeat of these businesses,” says Cameron. “We’re the guys running into the burning building, and the bankers are the ones running out.” This intense loyalty generates profound client retention, allowing the business to scale efficiently on a relatively small base of highly vetted clients.
The journey from the wreckage of Midrand to the quiet success in Greenside has not been without its toll. But rather than attempting to rewrite the past or retreat into corporate anonymity, the team at the helm of UsPlus is focused on building an iterative, highly adaptable future.
When unforeseen macroeconomic shocks hit, the company does not rely on the rigid, slow-moving protocols that plague large-scale banking institutions. When Covid upended the global economy, Kirkinis gathered his small team and instituted a simple grounding mantra: “Control the controllables.”
For the executive suite at UsPlus, avoiding the pitfalls of the past isn’t achieved through complex financial engineering or burying heads in the sand. It is achieved through maintaining a relentless grassroots focus on the SME sector and actively choosing not to be paralysed by past failures or broader market pessimism. A testament to this persistence is written on a board in the office: “103 Nos, 1 Yes”. It serves as a daily reminder of the 103 failed attempts they endured to secure an external investor before finally landing their first one.
“If you are doing something that you’d rather not be doing on a daily basis, it catches up to you somewhere,” says Sayers. “So it is much easier to keep going in those times when you are already doing something that resonates.”
Building a resilient, mission-driven business after a public collapse requires a profound degree of introspection. It requires accepting the parts of a failure that were self-inflicted, pulling the viable lessons from the wreckage, and using that painful clarity to build something fundamentally better.
“Whatever consequence happens in your life, some things are out of your control, and some things are absolutely in your control, but you just don’t see it,” Kirkinis says.
“It’s a question of perpetual discovery. If you don’t learn from how you stumble, you miss out on what exciting prospects the future holds. You can be the person standing on the platform, watching the train go by, or you can choose to get on board.”
The ghost of banking past
Founded in the late 1990s, African Bank offered high-interest unsecured cash loans to lower-income individuals. By 2013, under Leon Kirkinis’s leadership as CEO, it boasted a loan book of about R60bn and served more than 3.2-million customers.
However, the bank relied heavily on wholesale funding rather than retail deposits, leaving it vulnerable to shifting market confidence and macroeconomic deterioration. When long-running mining strikes and rising inflation hit South Africa in 2012, borrowers began to default.
The fatal blow, however, was self-inflicted: the R9.1bn acquisition of the low-price furniture retailer Ellerines. Advocate John Myburgh, tasked by the Reserve Bank to investigate the collapse, delivered a scathing 477-page report that laid the blame squarely at the feet of the board and its CEO.
The Myburgh report found that Kirkinis lodged the regulatory application to acquire Ellerines before the two boards had formally approved it, which Kirkinis denied. Following the acquisition, the African Bank board advanced about R1.4bn in unsecured loans to keep the chronically ailing retailer afloat.
The report used the term “hubris” to describe Kirkinis’s leadership style. It defined the event as “a loss of contact with reality and an overestimation of one’s own competence, accomplishments or capabilities”. Colleagues described Kirkinis as “too nice a guy” who struggled to hold subordinates accountable, yet his sheer charisma allowed him to override internal risk controls.
This became obvious when Kirkinis insisted on a relaxed CD4 (contractual default) impairment trigger, whereby impairments are fixed only after four missed payments rather than the industry standard CD1 model. This artificially inflated the bank’s apparent health, despite warnings from the FD and external auditors. By the time the board forced an additional R3bn impairment provision in August 2014, the damage was terminal. Kirkinis resigned, and four days later, the Reserve Bank placed African Bank under curatorship.
The African Bank of today is a distinct entity from the institution that collapsed in 2014. Following its relaunch in 2016, the bank re-emerged under a completely diversified banking model, pivoting away from the monoline unsecured lending strategy to become a full-service transactional bank.
The Financial Engine
The financial statements of UsPlus reveal a trajectory of aggressive, compounding growth. By the close of the 2025 financial year, the company had pushed its total assets to R402.1m (up from R257.4m in 2024). This growth has translated directly into the bottom line. Turnover— measured as the gross value of discounting arrangements purchased — reached R977m in 2025, representing year-on-year growth OF 25.8%. The effective annual discount rate was 6.6% (up from 5.7% in 2024). Net profit for the year soared from R4.78m in 2023 to R7.02m in 2024 and hit R11.65m in 2025, representing 143.7% growth over the past three years.
Fuelling this volume requires significant wholesale debt, and the evolution of UsPlus’s liabilities tells a story of increasing institutional credibility. Operating as a specialised financier, the company is highly leveraged, carrying roughly R325.8m in total borrowings (including shareholder loans) against an equity base of R74.2m in 2025. While the gearing ratio (3.36:1) might appear aggressively high to a casual observer, it falls comfortably within the strict prerequisites set by the lenders. Because certain facilities are subordinated, they are mathematically treated as equity for covenant calculations. This widely accepted leveraged finance practice provides the company with the necessary headroom to continue scaling the asset book without breaching the strict 4:1 maximum default triggers imposed by senior lenders.
In its early scaling phase, the company relied heavily on relatively expensive foreign venture debt, such as a $10m facility from Lendable Asset Management priced at a steep 13.5% per year. However, by 2024, management had executed a refinancing strategy. It established a R1bn domestic medium-term note programme on the JSE, which allowed the company to tap directly into cheaper domestic institutional liquidity. This includes the sustainability use of proceeds bond (USPS01).
From a financial perspective, this social bond structure is highly advantageous. By guaranteeing that 100% of the proceeds go towards measurable ESG targets, UsPlus attracts specialised impact investors. The company has also obtained an $8m senior unsecured facility from the US’s International Development Finance Corporation, priced at a highly favourable fixed rate of 5.25% per year, completely settling the expensive Lendable Asset Management facility in the process. This drastic reduction in the cost of capital has fundamentally widened the company’s profitability corridor.
To ensure sustainable growth and align executive incentives directly with the long-term health of the balance sheet, UsPlus tackles the classic corporate agency problem. Typically in the sector, financial executives are offered incentives to grow the loan book aggressively to secure huge short-term cash bonuses, regardless of the long-term impairment consequences.
UsPlus eliminated this by refusing to pay traditional fixed salaries to its principals. Instead, staff are all remunerated exclusively through an economic value-added scheme (EVAS). In terms of this, executives earn a share of the profits only if the company generates a genuine economic surplus of more than the total cost of funding and capital.
To live month to month, executives draw cash advances. Crucially, these are legally recorded on the balance sheet as interest-bearing “loans to shareholders”. At year-end, once the external auditors sign off on the profits and any impairments, the board allocates the EVAS profit share. The company then intercepts this profit share to pay off the executive’s loan.
A practical example of this strict accountability can be seen in Kirkinis’s remuneration for the 2025 financial year. Throughout the year, he drew monthly lifestyle advances which, with mandatory interest, totalled about R1.3m. At the end of the year the board awarded him an EVAS profit share of R970,000 based on the company’s performance. Because his advances exceeded the profit share he actually earned, he received no cash bonus. Instead, his entire profit allocation was swallowed by his debt, leaving him personally owing the company the difference.
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