- Explain what you do to a 5-year-old.
Imagine your Aunty Tolu sells plantains in the market. Every day, she gets plenty of cash, notes, and coins. She wants to save for your cousin’s school fees, but she’s afraid to keep it at home, and the bank feels too far, or she feels so scared that if she keeps the money in the bank, it disappears overnight because she doesn’t trust anything called digital. So, what do I do? I helped build a magic box on her phone. But here’s the trick: she doesn’t have to start there. She can give her cash to Uncle Fayokemi, our trusted agent. Uncle Fayokemi uses his own phone to put her money safely into her magic box. Now, Aunty Tolu can see her savings on her own phone and use it to buy electricity or pay for TV, all without carrying cash, and this will happen after we have helped her to trust our app. My job is to build that bridge between the paper money in her hand and the safe money on her phone.
- You worked at Lloyds Banking Group as a Customer Service Advisor. What does that mean, and what did it teach you about building a fintech for Africans?
My job at Lloyds was simple: help customers who were confused, frustrated, or stuck with their money. I was the person you called when the ATM ‘swallowed’ your card or the app was working. The biggest lesson was this: people everywhere just want things to work without stress. At Lloyds, they kept making their app simpler, adding features for students, new parents, and retirees, meeting people where they were.
Building for Africa, I took that lesson and added our own spice. For many here, the problem isn’t just a bad app; it’s total distrust of anything digital with money. My time at Lloyds taught me to have infinite patience. So for Smartsave, we didn’t just build an app and shout “Come!” We built a system that starts with the familiar: the corner shop, the human face you know and greet every day. The tech sits quietly in the background, earning trust slowly. The app has to be so simple that an old person can use it.
- What is the biggest lesson you’ve learned from scaling a fintech product in Nigeria?
The biggest lesson is that scale will expose every single weakness you tried to hide. You can have 10,000 users and look like a star, but when you get to 100,000, every small wahala becomes a big fire.
Maybe your server wasn’t strong enough for a Friday evening when everyone is topping up airtime. Or your customer service team can’t handle the volume of questions. The market will test you for real. I learned that scaling isn’t about moving fast and breaking things. In Nigeria, if you break things, you lose people’s trust, and that trust is everything. It’s about moving carefully, building systems that don’t break, and knowing that your user’s patience is your most important asset. You’re not just scaling a company; you’re scaling trust.
- What is one thing you’re interested in but not particularly great at doing?
I love the idea of coding. I can sit with my tech team, and we can dream up a beautiful, logical plan for a new feature. I see the whole structure in my head! But when I try to write the code myself… eh, it is well.
Once, I spent a whole weekend trying to build a simple tool to automate a report. I finally got it to work! Proudly, I showed my lead engineer. He smiled, said ‘Good attempt,’ then, in about three minutes, he rewrote my entire code. My 100 lines became fifteen clean, efficient lines. It was like watching a master chef take your simple stew and, with two touches, turn it into a gourmet feast. I appreciate the art, but I’ve accepted my lane. I am the person who describes the delicious feast we need; I leave the cooking to the chefs.
