After graduating in March 2020 from Obafemi Awolowo University in Osun State, southwestern Nigeria, with a Botany degree, Elizabeth Ajao appeared set for a career in finance. She had spent years planning to pivot from discipline, only for the global COVID-19 pandemic to rewrite her plans.
“I knew I wasn’t going to do anything with Botany, so I had been preparing myself since 300 level for a finance career after school was done,” Ajao says. “I had secured an internship in the corporate finance division of Sterling Bank before leaving school. But the pandemic happened, lockdown started, and I couldn’t resume the role.”
Ajao looked for alternatives for weeks. She landed a product operations internship at SmartTeller, a digital banking platform-as-a-service company.
“That was my first entry into tech, even though I didn’t realise it then,” she recalls.
The journalism interlude
After six months at SmartTeller, Ajao transitioned to tech journalism.
“At the time, I just wanted to make money because I was out of a job. And I found the writing-related role at Weetracker,” she recalls.
The income helped, but writing wasn’t an unfamiliar territory; Ajao had always enjoyed it.
In 2019, while in her third year at the university, she had written for the Botany department’s publication, the Department of Botany Board. Before the end of her fourth year, she had started editing for the publication.
Joining WeeTracker, a Pan-African research and media company, during the height of the pandemic in October 2020, she began documenting the African tech ecosystem she intended to build within.
“I was focused on covering emerging stories in African tech. It was short-lived (three months), but I told a lot of stories, about 30 at the time,” Ajao says.
At WeeTracker, she wrote about startups, innovation, and the economy in Africa, notably venture funding in Francophone Africa, Kenya’s SportPesa, and the end of cheque usage in South Africa.
She credits that period with shaping her understanding of the broader African startup ecosystem.
“[Tech journalism] exposed me more to the tech industry. You get to know more companies, more startups, by default,” Ajao says.
Eventually, writing about the industry wasn’t enough; she wanted to be inside it.
However, the path forward wasn’t immediately clear. “I actually considered product management, but I wasn’t sure how to get in,” she recalls.
Ajao eventually got a product management internship in 2021 at VFD Microfinance Bank Limited (VBank), a Lagos-based financial services institution, doing product operations. It was a period she remembers for the intensity of the work.
“I took the internship because I wanted to get exposure, experience, and I wanted to also prove myself,” she recalls.
In late 2021, she left VBank for Enyata, a software development agency that builds digital products for partners across multiple industries, where she spent over two years as a project manager. She worked with clients including Mdaas Global, an African health-tech company, and Prestmit, a digital asset marketplace, helping them move “their ideas into workable solutions.”
It was at Enyata that she realised her niche was not just tech, but specifically finance.
“I realised that when I was building FinTech products, there was this level of joy that came [with building them]. So when I wanted to niche, it was a no-brainer for me to go to a FinTech company. It just came naturally to me,” Ajao recalls.
Builders in Fintech
The natural affinity for financial systems led Ajao back to the banking sector, but she job-hunted for seven months: “I had a really hard time going back fully into fintech after my internship and role at Enyata. An easy way in for me was working in a bank.”
In 2023, she secured a role in 2023 as Product Manager, Payments, in the tech team at Polaris Bank, a Nigerian commercial bank.
“I oversaw payments for the VULTe 3.0 app, the digital banking arm of Polaris Bank. My role involved making payments on the app reliable,” Ajao says.
During her first nine months on the job, she discovered a void in the market: there was no central repository for the localised knowledge required to build financial products in Africa.
“For fintech, especially when you’re building within the African context, the knowledge you need to build is actually not very out there,” Ajao says, “I found myself struggling a lot in the early stages. Everybody was just winging it. You can go on ChatGPT and Google, but you don’t get as much localised knowledge as you would right from talking to someone who is actually building.”
