Building for Africa’s Financial Inclusion: My Wave Journey Part 2

Dear Omo - In 2 to 3 years, I want to run/lead a payments/fintech company with ties between the US and emerging markets in Africa, particularly Nigeria, to help the ecosystem grow

Part 1

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!