Inside OPay: CTO reveals the technology powering 100 million daily transactions

Before OPay became one of Africa’s largest fintechs with nearly 50 million users, it was a company wondering whether it would survive its first year.

That is the honest account Dotun Adekunle, OPay’s Chief Technology Officer and Chief Operating Officer, shared in a conversation with Semudara Abayomi, offering one of the most candid behind-the-scenes looks at how Nigeria’s digital payments industry was actually built. Not the polished version. The real one, complete with fibre cuts, rooftop radio resets, and months of trying everything from ride-hailing to food delivery just to get people to open a wallet.

Adekunle was there at the very beginning, not just at OPay, but before it. He was the technical lead at Paycom, one of Nigeria’s first mobile money operators, back in 2010, when USSD was used only for airtime top-ups and checking balances, when smartphones had not yet arrived, and when the National Identity Management System had barely started. He remembers climbing to the tops of skyscrapers to manually reset radio routers when a fibre cut brought transactions down.

“Nigeria was not just ready,” he said simply.

That context matters because it explains how far the industry has come, and how much of that distance was covered by people building infrastructure that did not exist, on networks that were not stable, for customers who had never been asked to trust a phone with their money before.

From Paycom to Opay, and the lessons a failed pivot teaches

Paycom grew steadily through the early 2010s alongside four or five other players in Nigeria’s nascent mobile money space. Then in 2016, the Central Bank of Nigeria raised capitalisation requirements, wanting mobile money operators to be as…