Opeyemi Folorunsho is the Vice President of Research and Development (R&D) at Moniepoint, where he focuses on translating deep technical ideas into systems that deliver real-world impact. His background is in distributed systems and infrastructure, and his work sits at the intersection of research and execution: identifying emerging opportunities, rigorously validating them, and building the platforms that bring them to life.
His core belief is that great engineering culture and first-principles thinking are what separate real innovation from trend-chasing. Over time, his focus has evolved from building systems to shaping their direction, guiding teams, setting the technical vision, and ensuring that research efforts translate into meaningful outcomes.
- Explain your job to a five-year-old.
Imagine you have a huge toy city where millions of people are playing every day. My job is to invent better roads, stronger bridges, and smarter traffic lights before the city gets too busy.
Sometimes I build new things myself. Sometimes I help other engineers build them. And sometimes I spend weeks figuring out a better way to solve a problem that nobody has solved before. My job is really to make sure the city keeps working even when millions more people arrive.
- What does R&D at a fintech actually look like day-to-day?
People often imagine R&D as scientists in a lab. In reality, it’s much closer to applied engineering.
A typical week involves understanding a difficult business problem, reading papers or technical documentation, evaluating existing technologies, building prototypes, measuring trade-offs, and deciding whether an idea deserves to become part of the production platform.
Some projects never leave the prototype stage because the economics don’t work. Others end up becoming…
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Read Full Article by Opeyemi Kareem at techcabal.com
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