Nigeria’s payment ecosystem has experienced rapid growth in recent years, driven by innovation and the rise of fintech solutions. At the forefront of this transformation are remarkable women who are breaking barriers and shaping the future of financial services in the country.
These leaders are driving initiatives that promote financial inclusion, create innovative payment solutions, and redefine the way Nigerians interact with money.
Here are some of the women impacting Nigeria’s payment landscape:
Odunayo Eweniyi
Odun Eweniyi is the co-founder and chief operating officer of PiggyVest, a digital investment platform in Nigeria. Founded in 2016, PiggyVest is an online savings & investment platform operating in Nigeria with about 5 million registered users. Piggyvest gives access to simple ways to save, invest, and manage money.
Eweniyi is a business executive and activist with a seven-year background in business analysis and operations. She has won numerous awards, including the Forbes Woman Africa Technology and Innovation Award, the Future Awards Africa Prize in Technology, Forbes Africa on the 30 under 30 Technology, and many others.
Solape Akinpelu
Solape Akinpelu is the founder of HerVest, a women-focused and inclusive fintech platform for the underserved and excluded women in Africa. HerVest enables women to participate in savings, impact investments, and credit, particularly for smallholder women farmers in Nigeria. With over 40,000 members, HerVest is dedicated to improving women’s lives through financial access and services.
Akinpelu is also the global co-chair of Marketing for the Women in Tech Global Movement and the Country Manager for Nigeria. She is also the chairman of Technology at the Nigerian-British Chamber of Commerce, promoting technology trade and investment between Nigeria and Britain. She is a member of the Presidential High-Level Advisory Committee for the President of Nigeria on Women and Girls’ Economic Empowerment. In addition, she sits on the Gender Committee Desk at CBN on Framework for Advancing Women’s Financial Inclusion.
Read also: Establishing payment security and credit systems in Nigeria’s business sphere
Chinyere Don-Okhuofu
Chinyere Don-Okhuofu is the Divisional Chief Executive Officer of Sales Networks at Interswitch. She is a leader in the payment industry with over 16 years of experience. She joined Interswitch in January 2012 as the Chief ATM and Devices Officer and became the Divisional CEO of Industry Vertical Markets in April 2014. Chinyere is a qualified chartered accountant and an alumnus of the Lagos Business School and the London Business School.
Tomilola Adejana
Tomilola Adejana, the founder of Bankly, began her career after graduating in Physiology from the University of Lagos in 2009. After working at the United Nations Millennium Development Goals project and Meristem, where she excelled in client relationship management and investment analysis, she transitioned to fintech.
Her passion for fintech was ignited while pursuing an MBA in Investment Banking and Financing at S. P. Jain School of Global Management. A project for a peer-to-peer lending company in Sydney deepened her understanding of lending models. Despite an offer from a private equity firm to conduct a fintech market survey in Africa, Tomilola returned to Nigeria to resume investment banking.
However, her path shifted when she collaborated on SmartCredit, a product by Access Bank and Airtel. This experience led her to found Bankly, a fintech company that promotes financial inclusion by offering secure, innovative services to Nigeria’s unbanked and underserved populations. Tomilola’s journey highlights her commitment to using technology to transform access to financial services in Africa.
Yanmo Omorogbe
Yanmo Omorogbe is Bamboo’s co-founder and chief operating officer, a Nigerian digital wealth management platform. Bamboo is a digital investment platform that gives Nigerians real-time access to buy, sell, or hold assets traded on the US stock exchange from their mobile phones or computers.
Before Bamboo, Yanmo worked as an investment analyst and an investment associate at African Infrastructure Investment Managers (AIIM), which develops and manages private equity infrastructure funds designed to invest long-term institutional unlisted equity in African infrastructure projects.
She was previously an assistant to a Nigerian Minister of Power, Works and Housing. She then returned to the private sector as part of the Transaction and Asset Management teams at African Infrastructure Investment Managers (AIIM), one of Africa’s largest infrastructure private equity fund managers. She is an alumna of Chemical Engineering from Imperial College, London.
Fara Ashiru-Jibutoh
Fara Ashiru-Jibutoh is the CEO and CTO of Okra, a Nigeria-based fintech platform that enables secure, real-time financial information exchange between customers, applications, and banks. Before founding Okra, Ashiru-Jibutoh worked with American startups like JP Morgan Chase, Sana Benefits, Fidelity Investments, BMW, and Canva, where she gained experience building and scaling products in emerging markets.
Fara also served as a co-founder and CTO of Shixels Studios, where she led the design and development of core technology for blue-chip clients, including Airtel, AXA Mansard, RenMoney, MTech, Sanofi Pharmaceuticals, and Nestoil. She has expertise in over 20 programming languages.
Seun Runsewe
Seun Runsewe is currently an Information Security Analyst at ChipperCash. She started her career at KPMG as a Business Analyst in the management consulting division and later as a Project Coordinator. After KPMG, she spent two years as a Business Lead at Paystack before starting Switch by Sterling Bank.
Runsewe received her first degree in Business Administration and Management from Covenant University, where she became interested in Technology. She is SAP, COMPTIA, and DMI certified.
Adebunmi Wellington
Adebunmi Wellington is the founder of Credo, a payment gateway, and Product Dojo, a hub for budding product managers.
She was the Head of Product at eTranzact International Plc, Nigeria’s first multi-application, multi-channel electronic transaction switching and payment processing platform. eTranzact supports millions of forward-thinking businesses and individuals who trust that their financial transactions will be handled daily.
Her experience spans several industries, multinationals, and government entities, including the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
She holds an advanced degree in Information Systems from the University of Maryland and has years of experience in Information Technology and Payments.
