Expansion has been one of fintech’s favourite success stories. Growth, especially in fintech, has often been measured by how quickly a company can move. But Adejuwon Oyebanjo, Co-Founder and COO of Passpoint, thinks the industry may need to slow down and ask a more basic question: Is the business actually working?
“The reason why businesses are started in the first place is to be profitable enough to remain, while solving for certain economic issues,” Oyebanjo says.
It is a simple point, but one that can get lost in an industry where growth is often celebrated long before profitability.
“I think businesses need to take back the philosophy of growing at all costs, out of the scenario, as against actually building a business that solves for a certain issue, and does so in a commercially viable way,” he says.
Oyebanjo’s perspective comes from having spent his career on the commercial side of banking and fintech. As a child, his introduction to technology came through an HP laptop his father bought. It came with games, typing software, and the Microsoft Office suite, and Oyebanjo spent time exploring whatever he could find on it. That curiosity eventually led him to study Computer Science.
His career later took him through Unified Payments, Flutterwave, and Binance. Today, Oyebanjo is the Co-Founder and COO of Passpoint, a fintech company building infrastructure for cross-border payments. His journey there has taken him from coding websites and managing trucks to banking, fintech, and crypto. It is also a journey that has shaped how he thinks about building and growing a business.
Finding a career beyond coding
Oyebanjo started his career after university, building websites and platforms for schools and churches under a mentor. The work was short-lived, however, and he moved into logistics, where he managed truck assets travelling between Lagos and other parts of Nigeria.
Before graduating, he interned in GTBank’s technology department, working on hardware and software installations. The experience left an impression on him, and he decided to return to the bank.
He did return, but not in the role he had expected. Instead of technology, Oyebanjo was placed on the commercial side as an account officer, a role that involved getting customers for the bank. It was his first real introduction to sales.
“It was hard at the start, but I stuck with it,” he says.
Over nearly five years, he grew from an account officer to a relationship manager and later to a branch manager. Along the way, he discovered that he enjoyed the commercial side of business more than he had expected.
Sales gave him the opportunity to meet people, understand their thinking, and find solutions that worked for both the customer and the business he represented. It also marked a gradual shift from the computer programming career he had initially imagined for himself.
One of the people Oyebanjo met at GTBank was Kelechi Uchegbulem, who is now Passpoint’s CEO. They joined the bank around the same time and went through the same training school. Over the years, their careers continued to follow remarkably similar paths.
“We kind of see ourselves as career twins,” Oyebanjo says.
Their careers were not the only thing they built together. Uchegbulem and another partner had been building the company for about two years while Oyebanjo watched from the outside and continued with his job. Then, the business reached what he describes as an inflexion point, and he joined fully as a Co-Founder to lead the commercial arm of the business.
The problem with growing for the sake of growth
For Oyebanjo, one of the biggest mistakes of fintechs is allowing the pressure to grow to become the business itself. Part of that pressure comes from the expectations around venture capital. Companies raise money with the understanding that investors want returns, and that can create an incentive to chase growth as aggressively as possible.
The result is that businesses sometimes pursue expansion before they have fully figured out whether their model works.
One example is the race to enter new markets. “We’re in 25 countries” might sound impressive, but Oyebanjo argues that presence alone says little about whether a business is actually succeeding in those markets.
Before entering a country, companies need to understand how the market works, including regulations and compliance requirements, payment methods, and consumer spending. Without that work, expansion can become a vanity metric rather than a business strategy. This is particularly important in payments, where markets can look similar from a distance but operate very differently on the ground.
Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana, for instance, all have payment systems that work for people within those countries. The challenge is not necessarily fixing those local systems, Oyebanjo says. The challenge is getting them to work together when money needs to move across borders.
Building for Africa is often discussed as though the continent is one large market waiting to be connected. But the reality, as Oyebanjo sees it, is that different markets already have systems people are comfortable using. The harder work is understanding those differences and building infrastructure that can connect them.
Another part of growth that fintech companies do not talk about as often is knowing when something is not working.
“If an idea doesn’t work, it’s not working for one, two, three, four, five months, and it’s not looking like it, you just have to know when to fail, shut down that particular process and then pivot to something else,” he says.
Oyebanjo emphasises that businesses need to be willing to fail fast and pivot rather than continue investing in an idea simply because it was the original plan. It is a lesson Passpoint has had to learn, too.
Before joining Passpoint, Oyebanjo and some of its founders had worked on a business which explored a similar space. The business made close to $300,000 in nine months, according to him, validating some of their assumptions about the market. But because the team had full-time jobs and other options, they eventually moved on from the project.
His eventual move to Passpoint also came at a difficult moment for the company. The business was struggling financially and with sales conversion, and Oyebanjo joined fully to focus on its commercial realities and cut away things that were not serving the business.
Having worked at companies where growth was a major focus, Oyebanjo has developed strong views on what fintechs should prioritise when attempting to expand.
His first point is profitability. He believes businesses can sometimes lose sight of the need to build something that can remain commercially viable while solving a real problem. The pressure to grow quickly, particularly in an environment where investors expect strong returns, can push companies towards growth at all costs.
But growth alone does not necessarily make a sustainable business.
Why cross-border payments are still difficult
According to Oyebanjo, the problem with cross-border payments is not that payment systems do not work within African countries. In many cases, they do.
Nigeria has bank transfers, Kenya has M-Pesa, and Ghana has mobile money services. People in those markets are familiar with these systems and use them comfortably. The difficulty begins when those systems need to interact across borders. A person in Ghana trying to transact with someone in Kenya or the UK may encounter a different set of challenges.
Behind many cross-border transactions are payment rails and processes that can make moving money expensive and slow. That is where Passpoint sees an opportunity.
The company is building what Oyebanjo describes as an orchestration layer that enables currencies and payment methods across different corridors to communicate more seamlessly while remaining commercially viable and compliant.
For him, two issues stand out as the biggest sources of friction in cross-border payments: regulation and infrastructure.
Regulation shapes what businesses can do and how they do it, while infrastructure that meets regulatory requirements still needs to be built. These issues become even more important as new technologies, including crypto and stablecoins, become part of conversations about the future of payments.
“Long term, Passpoint is building a network of networks,” he says. “We’re bridging that divide between all the different corridors where we currently have local capabilities.”
Perhaps the answer is not always to build more, enter more markets, or announce more products. Sometimes, the work is less visible: understanding what already exists, figuring out where the actual gaps are, and building something that can survive long enough to fill them.
The next decade of cross-border payments will likely bring new technologies and ideas. Oyebanjo expects crypto, AI, and particularly stablecoins to play a bigger role in how money moves across borders.
But these new technologies alone will not solve the industry’s old problems. Fintechs will still have to understand the markets they operate in. They will still have to navigate regulation. And, perhaps most importantly, they will still have to build businesses that make commercial sense.
