When you complete a bank transfer or a fintech transaction in Nigeria, it is easy to ignore the myriad of processes that have gone on in the background for that transaction to happen.
Adeniyi Alogba has spent a good part of his career ensuring that those background systems do not interrupt the experiences of everyday users. As a product manager in fintech and financial infrastructure, he has been involved in building and deploying systems that power everyday banking across microfinance banks, finance houses, and other emerging financial institutions serving millions of Nigerians.
Alogba studied psychology at Obafemi Awolowo University, having initially been admitted for mechanical engineering. His first real encounter with what technology could do came earlier, in secondary school, when a friend studying in the United States remotely identified his phone model and network carrier.
“I was amazed at how he did that, and I immediately wanted to know how to do it,” he recalls.
It eventually fuelled his first company. In 2019, he cofounded iEVENTYFY, an event discovery platform that connects people to events near them.
At the time, he did not fully grasp the tasks he was undertaking, but he knew he needed to execute the idea in the best way possible.
“I began to read and conduct market research. I also needed a frontend engineer and a designer. But there was somebody who needed to manage all of these processes. That person was me. I just didn’t know there was a role that quantified that.”
He would later learn that the role was product management.
After iEVENTYFY wound down, he built another product to help restaurants manage their operations from a single tool, and found it significantly easier, because he had learnt the hard lessons from the first. That transition marked the point at which his work moved from experimentation to building systems used in real financial environments. But he recognised that building in isolation had limits, and that getting a formal job was how he would close the gap.
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“I had never worked in tech. My introduction to tech was through building startups, and I realised that I needed to know more. There is an ecosystem, and I needed to build my own connections.
Building products for financial inclusion
His first formal job in tech was at SecondCaesar International Services Limited, an IT company where he played a leading role in the design and deployment of Creditium, a core banking platform now deployed and actively used across microfinance banks, finance houses, and other emerging financial institutions in Nigeria.
Core banking systems are the engine underneath everything a bank does. Many of the services banks offer customers are managed by the core banking application, directly affecting how quickly banks can process transactions, approve loans, and serve customers in real time. Alogba’s lead role as Product Manager in building the product solidified the experience he had acquired from building his startups.
For large commercial banks, enterprise systems from global vendors handle their core banking. But for smaller institutions like micro-lenders and community finance houses that serve markets the big banks often ignore, those systems are frequently out of reach due to cost.
“The economic realities would not allow them to afford these solutions,” he says. “So that’s where this core banking came up, indigenously built by a Nigerian founder, to help you manage your day-to-day transactions that strengthen your ability to scale fast.”
At SecondCaesar, Alogba was responsible for product decisions, addressing technical queries, designing systems, and delivering solutions across client institutions. He led cross-functional teams across both his own organisation and the client institutions, training senior staff, junior staff, and managing stakeholder relationships simultaneously.
Under his product leadership, Creditium was deployed across more than a dozen institutions, including Capival Investment Limited, Fortress Microfinance Bank, Zitra Microfinance Bank, Clearpay Microfinance Bank, Kopo-Kope Microfinance Bank, and Maestro Microfinance Bank, representing one of the more widely adopted locally built core banking systems within Nigeria’s microfinance sector. Each deployment represented a microfinance bank gaining access to infrastructure it previously could not afford and, with it, the ability to serve its customers faster and more reliably.
At some institutions, this shift reduced reliance on manual reconciliation processes and improved turnaround time for customer-facing services.
Olatunji Osinaike, Chief Executive Officer of SwitchMoon, who has collaborated with Alogba on multiple product initiatives, including mobile banking, Internet banking, and USSD systems, emphasises his ability to design solutions that address real-world constraints.
“One of the things that stood out in working with Adeniyi was his ability to design for real-world conditions. These are environments where connectivity is inconsistent, and users rely on basic devices. Every product decision had to reflect that reality, and he consistently delivered solutions that worked in practice, not just on paper,” he says.
Alogba advanced to Senior Product Manager at SecondCeaser and concurrently took a role as Head of Product at Eazy Credit, a business and individual lending product. There, his focus has expanded into one of the most consequential challenges in African financial services: credit infrastructure. Specifically, he is working on an alternative credit scoring system that reflects Nigerians’ actual financial behaviour, rather than a borrowed system from the Western market, addressing a structural gap in how creditworthiness is assessed in markets with limited formal financial data.
The problem is well-documented but rarely solved at the product level. In a country where large numbers of economically active people have no formal credit history, traditional lending models exclude potential borrowers who, by any reasonable measure, are creditworthy. The behaviours that demonstrate financial reliability, such as paying rent consistently, supporting family dependents, or managing informal savings, leave no trace in conventional credit systems. His work focuses on translating these behavioural signals into measurable credit indicators within lending systems.
“The credit infrastructure in Nigeria doesn’t follow what is peculiar to us,” Alogba says. “There are things like black tax, or I’m paying rent, and I’m contributing to my family. Those kinds of things should contribute to your credit score. They should make you creditworthy.”
His work at Eazy Credit is trying to formalise that by building a credit model that sees the people traditional systems have made invisible.
Alogba’s advantage
What distinguishes Alogba in a field increasingly crowded with product professionals is a combination of things he has developed over years of working in and around startups. He has a marketer’s instinct for how a product will be perceived and fluency in the technicalities of financial systems.
Beyond his day job, Alogba mentors young Nigerians navigating entry into the tech industry through one-on-one sessions and public speaking engagements.
He was involved with AIESEC during university, and he carries forward its ethos of deliberate leadership development. One of his mentees is now a senior backend engineer at a microfinance bank.
His longer-term vision is as clear as it is ambitious: to build sustainable financial products for Africa by Africans who understand the continent’s particular risks, its compliance environment, and the social realities that shape how money moves.
“We understand ourselves,” he says. “We understand our people. It’s us that can actually save us.”
The infrastructure that makes modern banking work is rarely the story anyone tells. But in a country where access to financial services can determine whether a small business survives a bad season or whether a borrower gets a fair hearing from a lender, the people building that infrastructure are doing work that matters far beyond what any app icon suggests.
Adeniyi Alogba is one of a growing group of product professionals contributing to the development of financial infrastructure in emerging markets.
