Kelechi Uchegbulem traces his career in technology back to his father. You see, while many others went in search of electricians to solve technical issues at home, Uchegbulem’s father, an engineer by profession, was the fixer. He recalls his father building stabilisers, power boosters, and other electrical solutions, and knowing even then that he wanted to pursue a career in technology.
And he did, eventually building Passpoint, a financial technology company handling the financial orchestration layer for Africa, Europe, and the G20. But his path was not without a few hurdles and failures. Uchegbulem’s first venture into tech was in university. While pursuing a degree in Marketing at Covenant University, he sought to build a crowdfunding platform for technology solutions in Nigeria.
But a solution like this was ahead of its time in the early 2010s when technology startups in Africa were not as widespread as they are now. So, it was difficult to scale. Over the next decade, he would go on to build other solutions, like an agency banking startup that could launch virtual accounts in Nigeria and a cross-border payments platform that were ahead of their time and, as a result, difficult to fund or scale.
“There were lots of challenges we were not ready for at the time. We were not able to secure capital to keep these solutions running. It is amazing that when you fast forward ten years later, virtual accounts make up over 15% of our web payments,” Uchegbulem says.
But these experiences did not derail him.
For Uchegbulem, choosing a career in marketing was intentional. While he had not been certain of the kind of business he wanted to venture into, Uchegbulem had always been certain of one thing: he was going to be an entrepreneur.
He decided that one of the best ways to achieve this goal was to work at a bank, as it would give him the structural experience to eventually run a business.
With this in mind, he got his first major banking experience at GT Bank as a Business Relationship Manager in telecoms marketing.
The foundation that made all the difference
“Working in the bank is what helped shape my career path,” Uchegbulem recalls. “Because it was a specialised type of marketing, a major requirement was that I become a subject-matter expert in telecoms. And it was a good learning ground because it taught me that the real backbone of financial services is telecommunications.”
His work at the bank exposed him early to some of the most critical players in Nigeria’s fintech ecosystem. Uchegbulem recalls his part in establishing OPay in the Nigerian market about two years into his work at the bank. He began engaging the fintech before they entered the country and was pivotal in acquiring its Certificate of Capital Importation (CCI) for its first investment in Nigeria and other licences.
Seeing how revolutionary OPay’s solutions were and how much faster than traditional banks they could scale, Uchegbulem decided to dive deeper into the payments industry.
He would visit his friends in the digital payments part of the bank to help him understand how the payments system and infrastructure worked.
“Sometimes I would buy them pizza so they could give me a one-hour lecture on the workings of the system,” he recalls.
However, when his curiosity was at its peak and there was little room left to grow within the bank in his chosen path, Uchegbulem knew that he had to leave the banking system for a chance to pursue a career in payments.
Building a career in payments
This decision led him to Unified Payment Services, Nigeria’s first digital payments company, where he became the Head of Corporate Payments Solutions. When he joined the company, many parts of its operations had not been automated, allowing him to understand the most minute details of payment infrastructure.
At the time, Unified Payment was operating in an ecosystem much different from the financial technology space Africa currently runs in, and this was pivotal for Uchegbulem’s growth. Because he was directly involved in further digitising the company’s operations, he understood the infrastructure layer that supported the financial service.
He was a significant contributor to moving the fintech division from a loss-making venture to a profit-making one and also automating the Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) collection systems for several states across Nigeria. These lessons would eventually come to play when he joined Flutterwave and later built his own financial services company.
“Flutterwave was a very different experience from what I was used to. It allowed me to operate at the pan-African level.”
Uchegbulem’s engagement with the public sector at Unified Payment would become a reference point for his achievements at Flutterwave. The company, which up to that point had worked with corporate clients, was introduced to its first deal with the public sector. Uchegbulem led the Nigeria Railway Corporation’s engagement with Flutterwave, bringing it on as a payment gateway on the NRC’s digital booking platform.
Despite his time in well-established payment companies, Uchegbulem felt that something was missing in his portfolio. He had mastered the payments industry after only a few years working in and around it, but cryptocurrencies, a novelty in payments, were becoming pervasive, and an experience in that ecosystem was an obvious gap on his resume. To solve this, Uchegbulem joined BVNK, a cross-border payments company with a focus on stablecoins.
“Joining BVNK was quite strategic. This is why I like to say that I have a very rare 360-degree experience of payments because I have been privileged to work across all the aspects of payments.”
This rare experience was and still is Uchegbulem’s advantage as it gave him an understanding of all the moving parts in payments and how they connect and where the gaps in the ecosystem still existed.
One of those gaps was what led to the creation of Passpoint.
Strengthening cross-border payment rails across Africa
Uchegbulem and his co-founders Adejuwon Oyebanjo and Chinedu Ojiteli noticed the fragmented nature of Africa’s payment ecosystem. They saw that payments in individual African markets had been solved. For example, Nigerian banks and fintechs were running smoothly on the NIBSS Instant Payments (NIP), and M-Pesa had revolutionised Kenya’s payment ecosystem.
However, because the payment rails are localised, a problem surfaces when an individual or business needs to send money from Nigeria to Kenya.
“We believed that if we could build a layer that could connect all these rails and make them clearly interoperable, we would solve a fundamental problem, especially with African trade,” Uchegbulem says.
Today, Passpoint operates across 35 countries in Africa and the G20, making local payment rails globally usable for businesses through a simple integration.
Uchegbulem defines the process of solving this problem as both challenging and rewarding. On the one hand, building an infrastructure layer for payments across continents comes with very peculiar compliance issues and on the other hand, globalising local payment rails inevitably involves dealing with complex currencies, currency volatilities, and payment speed.
But building a global payment network precludes ease, and Uchegbulem agrees.
He sees Passpoint becoming an ecosystem that fully hosts all local payment rails, handling the technicalities of payments across diverse peoples and currencies.
