For the first half of this article, head to Part 1!

Quick intro on my path to Wave & Africa

Prior to joining Wave, I had worked at various fintech & financial firms in the US, primarily in California and New York. Startup → Deloitte → J.P. Morgan → BlackRock → Stripe → Wave. A lot of my domain knowledge around tech, engineering leadership and product is heavily US / Silicon Valley driven. I am Nigerian too, and spent most of my formative years there - I came to the US for grad school at 22. This duality helped me a lot in navigating many of the differences and nuances across cultures. Let’s get into some things that are top of mind!

What I found unique about working in Africa

Continent, not country

I live by Jason Sudeikis’s words: Be curious, not judgmental.

In some interactions with folks, I find that people tend to think of Africa as one big country. It is not! I am not judging you. To satisfy your curiosity, here are some interesting anecdotes:

• There are 54 countries in Africa with over 2000 languages. Nigeria alone has over 500 languages spoken. There is so much diversity across the whole continent, even just in West Africa where I am from, each country has its unique cultural and economic features.

• There is quite a disparity in the sophistication level of the financial / fintech markets across the countries, even countries that are neighbours

• Operationally, countries are quite large and expansive. This does bring some interesting challenges when growing and managing a network for your products. For example, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (~2.4M square kilometers) contains nearly a quarter of Europe’s total area (~ 10M square kilometers)

Cultural differences

Not to generalize across all the countries, but you find that a common value across many countries is Respect. I am big on respect and love how ingrained this is. However, this shows up interestingly in the workplace, where there is a hierarchical structure that needs to be followed. You cannot talk to your boss’s boss without the go-between. It is common to go knock on a GM’s door every morning to greet them as a custom. You can be sitting next to someone who can solve a pressing issue, but because the reporting chain is above you, you will need to go through other channels to get your request reviewed.

Another difference I noticed quite strongly is the idea of self-promotion of one’s work in the professional setting. In my time working at my various US companies, it is encouraged to champion what you have done and try to make your work more visible. You are at times required to speak up in meetings about your contributions, document your achievements and ensure your efforts are visible to leadership. This at times feels like bragging, but closed mouths don’t get fed. In contrast, my African work experience highlighted a fundamentally different philosophy. There is a cultural emphasis on letting the work speak for itself rather than speaking for the work. This approach values humility. I actually find that there needs to be a balance to both philosophies. I felt like I understood both styles as a Nigerian living in the US, so I adjust my approach as needed and found myself being a bridge during my time at Wave.

Regulations and the pace of innovation

Having worked predominantly in heavily regulated spaces, I have become accustomed to the complex compliance and regulatory landscape that governs them. You will quickly find that fintech regulations are quite different from consumer tech - there are a lot more requirements and ongoing due diligence that happens.

One key difference between the US vs Africa I observed was how the legal requirements were written, interpreted and enforced. During my time in the US, the compliance and regulatory requirements were highly prescriptive and detailed. We would have teams of product legal counsel that worked tirelessly to understand and translate them to product requirements. This created opportunities for creative engineering solutions that would operate within the regulatory boundaries while pushing innovation forward. Legal and product engineering teams would regularly engage in nuanced discussions about the regulatory interpretation - for example, determining whether a product offering is credit when an account goes negative but we have intraday settlement.

In contrast, during my time in Africa, the regulatory environments often feature more high-level, principle-based frameworks that leave significant room for interpretation. While this can feel less worrisome initially, it does introduce a different kind of uncertainty, especially as you scale. This ambiguity breeds caution rather than innovation. There is a general reluctance to pursue creative compliance solutions or explore regulatory gray areas, largely because the open-ended interpretation can add risk to the business. I personally find that this results in a bit more caution in pushing the boundary on innovation but does reduce risk. One way to combat this has been to be more involved in public policy and regulatory approvals, getting ahead of any requirements that might stifle innovation.

Working with banking partners

Thinking about this, this challenge transcends geographical boundaries and is the reality of fintech. To borrow a quote from a past coworker (thanks for this gem, J!) “Working with banking partners is like swimming through honey”. It is sweet and all, but can be painfully slow at times. One consistent thing that has happened across the places I worked at is how bank partners can kill your roadmap overnight.

The relationship is paradoxical. You absolutely need the banking partners. When it is working well, they present a quick way to scale and offer capabilities that would have otherwise been unfeasible. However, when hiccups occur, and they do, the consequences are rarely small. Regulatory changes will force product pivots, integrations get delayed, you have to worry about service reliability. It is a delicate balance but it is a necessary one.

Resilience

I found African founders to be quite resilient. I will leave this anecdote from my friend Regis Bamba on the early days of Djamo and how they had to make notifications work for their customers.

AI Applications in African Fintechs: Beyond the hype

There is quite a lot of buzz (or noise) around AI so I will skip all the speculation and talk more about some specific, practical ways I find AI to be beneficial in the fintech space in Africa.

Engineering productivity and automation

These fall into several buckets:

• Coding assistants and agents: These are proving useful in accelerating the development cycles. These are the tools that assist engineers with code + test completion / generation, code reviews, automated security & fraud checks etc. The goal here is to take over tasks that might be more manual for engineers. Companies are touting a 30 - 50% increase in productivity, I find the reality to be more nuanced. I find these help a lot, but you still need to inspect the output. Nothing beats institutional knowledge and domain expertise, even if you are supported by AI.

• Gen AI tools: mostly around creating documents, synthesizing information etc. I will talk a bit more about how these help with operations later.

Improved internal search and knowledge management

This is relevant as your company grows and the knowledge bases start to become fragmented. I find knowledge management AI tools like Glean are amazing at helping aggregate information for you to search and summarize data. I find that it accelerates onboarding and learning by 50% if the sources are properly linked. A simple question like “What is the prepaid card product XXX, which team owns it and what regions is it in use” can be given to you in seconds. Another good use case is in seeing if there are similar features that exist to use as a template, promoting reuse and reducing redundant efforts.

Support Automation

Customer support represents one of the most promising areas for AI implementation in fintech, with its use spanning front-line customer interactions to back-end user insights. Some uses are:

• Chatbots: You can segment a lot of the reasons customers reach out and have chatbots & AI Assistants tackle some of these e.g learning about new features, scheduling call backs etc

• Self-service automation: Things like transaction disputes, account lockouts etc can be automated. This can extend your customer support to be accessible 24/7, which is critical for families that need support outside traditional banking hours.

• Customer insights and analytics: There is a lot of data collected from customer interactions. You can use AI/ML models to classify issues, help prioritize support focus areas, analyze support transcripts very quickly to identify systematic issues.

I do not think AI will ever replace customer support reps, but rather augment them. AI can increasingly handle routine, well-defined, high volume tasks like PIN resets, inquiries etc. However, humans still need to do the complex dispute resolutions, regulatory compliance and sensitive emotional issues.

Merchant Insights: AI-Powered Business Intelligence

This is one area I am particularly excited about. I think fintechs can do well to provide more AI-driven, actionable insights for merchants to optimize operations and drive growth.

The potential lies in conversational analytics tooling that enables merchants to ask natural language questions (even in Wolof or Mandinka!) about their business performance. Merchants get instant answers to important questions. An example is tooling that provides conversational insights to questions like:

• What are my worst-selling items?

• What were my busiest hours during the week?

• How many customers are new this week compared to last?

• What category of products are selling the most? selling the least?

• What are the common personas of customers that buy my top 5 products?

• For businesses of similar size and segment in my area, how do my sales compare?

• What periods did I run out of inventory during the year?

A lot of merchants lack access to business analytics tooling, so the potential here is transformative. I believe this deepens your relationship and changes your merchants from just users of your platform to partners.

Internal & Field Operations Analytics

Operating in cash-heavy regions, you need a lot of internal and field operators. These are teams that are canvassing to convert new users, ops to manage Agents and merchants, as well as supervisors overseeing all of this. This represents a significant opportunity for AI-driven optimization.

Generally, I find field operations fall into these three categories:

• Planning and preparation: At the start of the day, the field staff needs to understand their priorities, map optimal routes and prep the necessary materials for their needs

• Field operations and task management: This is real-time mapping, completing the tasks such as merchant onboarding, agent check-ins etc.

• Monitoring and reporting: End of day analytics around visit completion rates and performance metrics.

Similar to the merchant insights, I think this area is ripe for conversational analytics to support the internal and field operations staff. Some questions it can help answer are:

• What is the most optimal route to visit my top 10 merchants today?

• How did the merchants I onboarded last week perform compared to the first week averages?

• What merchants should I focus on today based on potential churn?

• Who are my top performing field operators?

• What zones are performing poorly relative to comparable sized zones?

• Which of my merchants are likely to be open for a visit today from 1pm to 4pm?

• What are busy periods for this agent so I can mystery shop then?

This approach empowers field operations to be more data-driven, self-service and efficient.

So What Next?

I truly enjoyed my time working at Wave, and I look forward to supporting African fintechs. If you have any questions or just want to chat, reach out. I will stay in the fintech space for the foreseeable future!

Leave comments, shoot me a message at omo@dearomo.com and/or subscribe!

I moved to the US from Nigeria in 2008 for graduate school, chasing educational and economic opportunities. I always wanted to return back home, but over time staying in the US felt sticky. I knew I wanted to work in Africa eventually though.

After several roles in tech, I strongly started to consider it during my time at BlackRock around 2018. I talked to a few companies but nothing felt right - the roles either expected me to relocate back to Africa full time or the pay was considerably lower than what I was making in San Francisco. In 2019 I joined Stripe, but just before I transitioned over I took a month to travel through Kenya and Rwanda, feeling out the tech ecosystem there.

The global pandemic changed things in 2020, and suddenly a lot of people were working remotely and that was acceptable. After several years at Stripe, in 2022, I was looking for what next and Africa was a strong consideration. Talking to companies, it was clear that more were open to remote work, and I was at a place financially where a drop in pay wasn’t as important to me as the mission. A friend mentioned Wave Mobile Money to me and I was very interested. I talked to several African companies, Wave included, and settled on Wave.

Why Wave?

Wave offered me the most unique blend of ease and challenges that I was looking for.

What I loved:

• It was fully remote. I could be with my family in California and still deliver impact globally. I would also get the opportunity to be in our operating countries frequently to be closer to the product

• It was at the intersection of financial inclusion and Africa, which are both dear to me

• The opportunity for impact was quite high, given how much Wave could grow in the region. I felt I could grow in the space

• I felt comfortable bringing my experience as a tech leader from my prior roles at Stripe, BlackRock, JP Morgan and Deloitte

• The founders already had success in Africa with Sendwave

What I felt challenged by:

• This would be my first time working in Africa

• While I had a lot of experience in fintech, I have never worked on Mobile Money. This would be my first time

• I did not speak French (at least beyond the basic “please I want water!”), which is the primary language in most of the operating countries: Senegal, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Mali

Ultimately the combination of what I loved and the challenges meant I felt I had an opportunity to be impactful, while also growing as a leader.

What is Wave Mobile Money and why is its mission important?

To truly understand why Wave Mobile Money is important is to first understand what is the playing field in Africa. For millions of people there, financial exclusion has been the norm.

In 2017, over half the population in Sub-Saharan Africa had no bank account. That's for good reason—the fees are too high, the closest branch can be miles away, and nobody takes cards. Without access to financial institutions, people are forced to keep their savings under the mattress. Small business owners rely on lenders who charge extortionate rates. Parents spend hours waiting in line to pay school fees in cash.

Wave is solving this by building financial services that just work: no account fees, instantly available, and accepted everywhere. In places where electricity, water and roads don't always work, you can still send money with Wave.

In 2017, Wave launched a mobile app in Senegal for cash deposit, withdrawal, and peer-to-peer and business payments. Now, Wave has millions of users across six countries and are growing fast. [About Wave]

Wave has been a success for digital payments and financial inclusion, where it pushed other dominant mobile money operators to lower their transaction fees by nearly 80% in Senegal. Backed by investors like Sequoia Capital and Stripe, Wave continues to transform lives in Africa.

What was my role and how it evolved

I joined Wave as the Director of Engineering for the user-facing products. The scope was pretty much any app / service that interacted with our users directly. When I say users, they fall into three broad (and sometimes overlapping) categories: Customers, Merchants & Agents.

Initially, the 5 teams under me were:

• Payments: Handled all our in-person and online payments

• Customer: Our core P2P and customer team

• Agent: Handled tech enablement for our agents and field operations

• Integrations: Handled our partner integrations with bill payments, airtime and banks

• Growth: Handled our initiatives & promos to help Wave acquire and grow users

This was a ~ 30 engineer org. As I leave Wave now, that has grown to ~ 50 engineers, with more teams under my scope for Risk, independent payment teams, Field Ops and Financial Services.

As a Director your focus area changes week over week, but I will describe my role as focused on:

• Team Leadership and Development: I developed our engineering managers and technical leads by providing mentorship and growth opportunities through 1-1s, skip level discussions, feedback sessions and workshops. My managers were varied in level and experience so I tailored my approach for each. For example, with my more junior managers I generally provided more hands-on guidance, while for the more senior managers I tried to provide more context for them to expand their influence.

• Career Development for Engineering: I either led or was involved in various career development initiatives. For example, I created the Tech Lead Manager ladder at Wave, and contributed to our first ever Engineering Manager Ladder. I led all calibration for my org during our bi-annual performance review sessions. I also led various workshops to help grow engineers into leaders internally.

• Execution Oversight and Operational Efficiency: I am very data driven and try to optimize my teams for efficiency. I tracked KPIs across each team to ensure it is delivering optimally. I also led initiatives to drive operational efficiency. For example, I led a company-wide reliability SLO drive.

• Strategic alignment and roadmap planning: I worked closely with product and business leaders to execute on the strategy. I was responsible for how well each team was staffed and equipped to accomplish its goals. I led various reorgs and internal mobility between teams.

• Quality standards: I worked on pushing the quality bar. I ensured teams are held to similar standards. This was either through clearer code review practices, or ensuring teams had good technical design documentation.

• Team Health and Culture: I led several initiatives across engineering to drive team health and culture. For example I ran team health surveys across all my teams every two months, with recommendations to team leads on what changes needed to be made to improve.

This is just the first part about my journey at Wave. For the next post, I will talk about what is unique about working in Africa and share some interesting things I worked on. Thank you for reading this!

Leave comments, shoot me a message at omo@dearomo.com and/or subscribe!

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The beginning of something great…

I struggled with what topic to kick off my blog. I mean, I have written blogs in the past around travel and culture. But this felt like it needed an evolution. My mind raced with different topics and themes. Should I talk about movies and OSTs (Interstellar’s by Han Zimmer is one of the most beautiful pieces out there)?; should I talk about being Nigerian in the US?; should I talk about parenting?

Ultimately I settled on the part cliche, part passion-driven themes of Tech Leadership, Cultural Story Telling & Immersive Culinary Experiences. After accumulating over 16 years (and going) of experience in engineering, leading innovation and growth in the fintech and financial services industry, I have gathered a wealth of knowledge in various topics. I am also publishing a children’s picture book about the Kingdom of Benin and host supper clubs at my garden - Omo’s Ugba!

I will publish several articles along these lines of interest. Hopefully you find something that rocks your boat. Subscribe and look out for future posts!