In the early 2000s, computing professionals had just prevented the Y2K disaster. Most Nigerians were still figuring out what the internet was. A young Seyi Akamo held his first Cisco certification in his hands. The CCNA — Cisco Certified Network Associate — was his entry ticket into a world that barely existed in Lagos at the time. At the time, “internet connection” meant a trip to the nearest cybercafé, and storage meant floppy disks that held 1.44 megabytes, if you were lucky.
He remembers one evening, shuttling back and forth between his computer and that cybercafé, trying to install a single program. Download a dependency. Trip back. Discover it needs another dependency. Another trip. Twelve, maybe fifteen times in a single night.
“There was no DHL for software,” he recalls, sitting in TUROG’s Lagos office two decades later. “But Ubuntu did something crazy — shipit.ubuntu.com. You could order Ubuntu CDs anywhere in the world. I got ten delivered in 2004. That was not easy to do.”
The Ubuntu founder was the man behind Thawte, the company that invented SSL certificates — those padlock icons on secure websites. He’d made his money and was giving away operating systems for free. At the time, he was the richest African on earth.
But it wasn’t the free software that shaped Seyi’s trajectory. It was what came later, in the mid-2010s, when PayPal announced its arrival in Nigeria.
“The only thing in Nigeria was PayPal, where money leaves your pocket,” Seyi says. “Not an ability to actually earn via PayPal. I realised that at the financial infrastructure level, we were really, really behind.”
That irritation would eventually give rise to TUROG Technologies. But first came 13 years of learning how to build the invisible architecture that makes modern finance work.
The making of a builder
Technology was one of the few things Seyi could do entirely alone. “You want to play football, you need at least one person,” he explains. “But computing — you could really get lost in it without needing a second person.”
After five years studying computer engineering and immersing himself in the Nigerian Linux Users Group, he made a decision that surprised everyone: he joined a Big Four consulting firm. Not as a developer. As a management consultant.
“Core technical skills were a given,” he says. “The big thing was: what are the kinds of problems you see in the world, and how do I find myself where those problems are being brought up?”
He thought he’d do one year. He stayed for twelve to fifteen years, learning how problems were identified, scoped, and solved at an enterprise scale.
His last project crystallised everything: a cross-border implementation spanning twelve to thirteen African countries. Differing tax systems, regulatory bodies, banking structures, and technological maturity. A masterclass in complexity.
“After that, you really have to ask yourself: so what next?”
The answer was to build the infrastructure Africa’s financial institutions desperately needed but couldn’t articulate. Not another consumer app. Not another mobile wallet. The actual plumbing — the rails, the middleware, the systems that would let banks and fintechs modernise without destroying everything they’d built.
But nobody was paying attention to infrastructure. This was the era of startup theatre and unicorn valuations.
“I’m the kind of person that naturally likes to play in spaces where there’s little attention,” Seyi says. “Behind the scenes type of thing.”
In 2016/17, he started TUROG Technologies with the explicit mission of building digital infrastructure for Africa. If fintech apps were the trains, TUROG would be the rail tracks.
Starting TUROG: The perfect storm
For Seyi, the moment came around 2017. He had over a decade of management consulting experience, deep technical expertise, and extensive exposure to how financial systems functioned across a dozen African countries. Digital banking was no longer theoretical. Real institutions were launching real products. And everywhere Seyi looked, he saw the same problem: nobody was building the infrastructure layer that would allow innovation to scale.
“It’s like a perfect storm,” he explains. “My background, my technical capacity, what I’ve done in the business space. If anybody is suited to do this, then I should be one of them.”
The early days were messy. Seyi was simultaneously CTO and CEO, writing code and writing proposals. The schizophrenia of wearing both hats manifested most clearly right before client meetings.
“There are some conversations where what they really want is comfort that there’s very strong technical capacity,” he recalls. “You go really deep on the technology. But if you do that in other rooms, you’ll lose them.”
He remembers entering a room full of business executives and launching into a technical deep-dive about system architecture. “They’re like, ‘Hmm, send it to us as a deck,’” he laughs.
But the technical-business duality gave TUROG a distinctive advantage. Most technology vendors either understood the business problem but couldn’t build the solution, or could build anything but didn’t understand what problem they were solving. Seyi could do both.
Still, establishing credibility as a new brand in one of the most risk-averse industries on earth was a challenge. Financial institutions don’t experiment with unproven vendors.
“When starting like that, you lean into personal experience,” Seyi explains. “Oh, I worked on this, I was this in this particular organisation. I leaned more on personal accomplishments.”
Then came the micro wins. Small projects where clients tested TUROG’s capabilities. Deliver those flawlessly, earn trust for the next one. It’s the slow accumulation of reputation in an industry where reputation is everything.
There was also the resource constraint. In the early days, TUROG collaborated with learners — interns seeking exposure and young engineers still refining their craft.
“What we could even pay was really around: interns, I’m just learning, can I come and work with you to learn?” Seyi says. “The strategic decision was not to give up, but to invest in these guys. We might not make as much money over a projected period.”
It was a calculated bet: sacrifice short-term revenue to build long-term capacity.
The market they’re building for
Around 2019-2020, Seyi made the strategic decision to focus exclusively on financial services. Before that, TUROG had worked across various sectors, including digital banking and agricultural storage projects. But bouncing between industries meant never going deep enough. The regulations change constantly. The Central Bank of Nigeria alone releases guidelines that can reshape entire business models overnight.
“It’s almost a full-time job to keep up with regulation,” Seyi says. “You either want to be good at this or average at this alongside other things.”
They chose to delve deep and be obsessively good in a critical space.
Africa’s fintech market is projected to reach $65 billion by 2030, but the infrastructure enabling this growth remains largely invisible. Somewhere in Lagos right now, a bank executive is staring at a core banking system that was installed when Y2K was a looming threat.
That system — with decades of transaction history, customer relationships, and compliance records baked in — is simultaneously indispensable and obsolete. Upgrade it, risk catastrophic data loss or regulatory violations. Don’t upgrade; watch competitors outpace you.”
Across the region, cost-to-asset ratios for African banks lagged global benchmarks because fragmented systems required human intervention where automation should exist. Meanwhile, mobile adoption surged. Nigeria’s Payments System Vision 2025 mandated API-ready infrastructure and CBDC compatibility. Open banking frameworks began appearing across markets. Core systems that could not integrate, scale, or adapt became liabilities overnight.
International vendors, such as Temenos and Oracle FLEXCUBE, dominate the market with systems designed for foreign banks — systems that are expensive, inflexible, and poorly suited to African regulations. Meanwhile, venture-backed fintechs promise to bank the unbanked while building on the same infrastructure.
“If you speak to a client and they say, ‘Oh, we have a core banking application already,’ I hear that all the time,” says Noah Honawon, who leads TUROG’s growth and sales team. “We usually tell them: our product works with your CBA. It’s so flexible that it works even with what you already have.”
Instead of a rip-and-replace approach, TUROG is building bridges.
The technical bet
ADIBA — “A Digital Bank” — is TUROG’s flagship product. It’s not a core banking system, which is the first misconception Noah always clarifies.
“When you have a CBA, where do you check your customer data? How do you verify NIN? How do you check BVN?” The answer is usually another dashboard, another vendor, another system.
“I talked to a client who said, ‘Every new customer that comes, I usually place a call to a bureau to check their NIN or BVN,’” Noah recalls. “Whereas with ADIBA, it’s just for you to plug in the number. From KYC to starting an application to loan management to internal communications — you have all that within ADIBA.”
ADIBA sits as a layer above core banking systems, providing digital and open banking capabilities on existing infrastructure. Banks plug their legacy systems into ADIBA and immediately gain modern APIs, better reporting, easier fintech integration, regulatory compliance, and a path toward eventual migration — without big-bang replacement risk.
“Our solutions are very flexible to work with your internal infrastructure,” Seyi explains. “We sit at a layer just above that, and we can work with your existing tools or provide tools that make you compliant.”
While competitors fight for consumer attention, TUROG bets that the most valuable position is the one nobody sees — the infrastructure layer powering everything else.
The team behind the vision
By 2024, TUROG had evolved from Seyi’s one-man operation into an actual company. There was a basketball court outside the office where team members met to have fun.
There was Dickson Adams Ugbaraese, the Dev Factory Manager, who’d spent a decade in financial technology. And Noah Honawon, the sales lead who’d made the leap from real estate to fintech and was now translating complex infrastructure concepts for everyone from Balogun Market traders to enterprise CTOs.
“TUROG is all about building that foundational infrastructure that helps financial institutions deliver digital transforming innovations,” Dickson explains, his phrasing deliberately unglamorous. Not “revolutionising banking” as you’d hear at times — just building infrastructure.
His approach to engineering management reveals TUROG’s operational DNA. When a client comes with a problem, the team doesn’t immediately start coding. They listen, embed themselves in the client’s operations, and understand constraints.
“We don’t just give it to the developers like they’re a make-machine,” Dickson says. “We bring the development team into the picture, where we all brainstorm around how we should solve that problem.”
At TUROG, junior developers are encouraged to propose solutions. “It’s not the case of ‘Oh, the senior person’s statement is word and law.’ It is not one of our core values.”
This addresses one of the most challenging problems in infrastructure companies: how do you keep talented developers motivated when their work is often invisible?
TUROG’s answer: internal recognition, transparency about impact, and celebrating wins that outsiders won’t see.
Noah solved a different problem: selling infrastructure to people who don’t know they need it. His journey to TUROG was unlikely — he’d spent his career in real estate sales before someone told him he’d do well in tech.
The culture shock was immediate. Real estate was B2C, transactional, and simple. But selling infrastructure to financial institutions? “I need to talk to the CTO, the operations manager, and the CEO. I need to meet a board, if possible. The process was longer, and I needed to speak to more people.”
Then there was the technical learning curve. “I had to learn how to explain the technical jargon to a layman.” He had six months to master the vocabulary of enterprise software well enough to teach it to others.
His breakthrough came when he realised every business has a financial layer. A trader in Balogun Market selling clothes? That’s embedded finance — help them accept payments online. A developer building a tax platform? That’s direct debit. A bank trying to comply with open banking? That’s ADIBA.
“We create competencies by going in depth into the subject matter,” Noah explains, “so much that when you hear us, you trust us.”
The talent challenge
But complexity isn’t just external. There’s also building a globally competitive team from Lagos — a challenge that forced Turog to restructure operations, compensation, and talent development entirely.
“Talent is a subset of the larger conversation around good talent immigrating,” Seyi reflects. “To get quality talent is almost trying to match what it will cost them with remote gigs. You’re operating at a global scale.”
If you need to pay global salaries, you need global revenue. If you need global revenue, you need to serve global markets. If you need to serve global markets, you need global-quality operations.
“We looked at: how do we structure as a global business?” Seyi says. “How quickly it takes to onboard new people to the level of quality we need. What are acceptable standards of milestones and deliverables on a global level? You bring someone in: can you do this? Can you hit the quality standards? If you can, you’re part of the team. If you can’t, the system finds ways to develop you internally or eject you.”
It’s brutal clarity about standards, but Seyi frames it as essential for survival. “I am of the viewpoint that you have no other choice than to build a global business from Nigeria if you’re able to survive,” he says. “If everybody else can pay a lot more than you can pay, then you can’t afford to pay anybody.”
The global-first approach influenced Turog’s expansion strategy. The company now works with clients across multiple African countries and has experience implementing systems outside the continent. Their work with the EU and Brazil’s open banking frameworks positioned them perfectly for Nigeria’s upcoming regulations.
The future is infrastructure
It’s late 2025, and Seyi Akamo is thinking about what Turog would look like if he were starting over today. The answer surprises: it wouldn’t be about core banking or identity management.
“Decentralised finance,” he says. “I’m not talking about cryptocurrency. But DeFi. If you were starting from scratch, it would be a case of trying to educate newer brands to say: yes, keep in tune with traditional systems, but also enable your systems for DeFi.”
It’s a striking admission that even someone who has spent 25 years in this space is still thinking about what’s next, what might make today’s architecture look as ridiculous as those floppy disks from the 2000s.
But that’s a future problem. Currently, Turog is focused on what Seyi sees as Africa’s next big infrastructure opportunity: open banking.
“Open banking opens the way for developers — TPPs, third-party providers — to actually innovate using banking services,” Seyi explains. “It’s going to open up a brand new layer. The future is bright. What we need to make sure of is that the designs are well implemented so that the second wave of innovation can kick off, and it will probably be a Pan-African one.”
Turog’s strategy is evolving. Instead of just selling to institutions, they’re building tools for developers. “We already have SDK offerings as part of our ADIBA product,” Seyi says. “We’re engaging both at the company and at the developer level — those people we believe will take finance to the next level of innovation.”
It’s a shift from pure B2B to B2B2C — empowering developers who, in turn, will serve consumers.
The Pan-African expansion continues to be what Seyi calls a “stay-awake issue” — the kind of strategic challenge that keeps founders up at night. These questions now dominate planning sessions, replacing earlier struggles of just trying to win Nigerian clients and keep the lights on.
But through it all, the core philosophy remains unchanged: build infrastructure that makes everything else possible, even if nobody knows your name. Power the banks and fintechs that get the headlines. Create the foundation so solid that innovation can happen on top of it.
Twenty-five years. That’s how long it’s been since Seyi Akamo held his first Cisco certification, since he shuttled back and forth to cybercafés with floppy disks, since he discovered that computing was something you could do alone.
Today, he sits at the helm of a company that powers financial infrastructure across Africa. There’s a through-line: the understanding that infrastructure matters more than flash, that foundations determine what’s possible to build on top of them, and that someone has to do the unglamorous work of laying the pipes even when everyone else is chasing headlines.
“Stay close to what’s happening in the country,” Seyi advises. “There’s a lot of upward trajectory growth here. And if you need a partner to take you on that journey, Turog is a company that can do just that.
