#TechCEO: Meet Nigeria’s Fintech Pioneer Tayo Oviosu, CEO of Mobile Payments Platform ‘Paga’
There has been an ongoing movement among politicians and entrepreneurs to achieve financial inclusion for the citizens of Nigeria. And Tayo Oviosu is one of those people.
Oviosu is the founder and CEO of Paga, a financial mobile payment platform established in 2009 to address the country’s financial payment challenges. It is also the largest mobile payment platform in the country, according to Nairametrics.
Nigeria’s greener pastures
Tayo had left Nigeria when he was barely 16 years old. He studied electrical engineering at the University of Southern California and worked for several startups during the early stages of the dot.com boom.
In an interview with Business Insider Africa, he revealed that he also worked for Deloitte Consulting, a company that provides various financial services to people around the world. After that, he returned to academia to earn an MBA from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.
Oviosu’s path to entrepreneurship was apparently already painted in the United States when he worked there for three more years. Already equipped with an impressive academic background and rich experience in the corporate field, it would be an easy feat to venture further into the United States.
However, he saw greener pastures in the country of Nigeria. He wanted to participate in the country’s economic development process, so he went back there in 2008 and started a job at a private equity firm called Travant Capital Partners.
He eventually left the company to become an entrepreneur. Not everything was cut out for Oviosu when he went back to his country, but he saw something “exciting” about how the private sector flourished around 2009.
Oviosu spent three months fiddling with various business ideas before finally coming up with Paga.
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The Rise of Paga
Oviosu used his savings from previous work to start up the company for the first six months. In addition, he hired friends to work in various capacities. His old boss, with whom he spent about three years working, as well as friends and family, were among the early investors in Paga.
He discussed how a friend contributed $5,000 in the early years of Paga and how that greatly helped Paga flourish. From humble beginnings, he eventually acquired 34 investors in 2018 and was seen as a pioneer in Nigeria’s Fintech industry.
As of March 2018, Paga had 8.2 million users who performed more than 2 million transactions worth more than $131 million. In addition, it has handled 48 million transactions and raised $3 billion since its inception.
With over 15,000 transaction agents serving their loyal communities in 35 states across the US, the mobile money platform boasts the largest agent network in Nigeria.
To increase inclusion for all Nigerians, it has also partnered with the country’s central bank (Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN) on the Shared Agent Network Expansion Facilities (SANEF) initiative. This initiative aims to increase the number of agents offering financial services to 500,000 Nigerians.
Oviosu, in a statement with Nairametrics, said he wants to change people’s lives by providing creative and open access to financial services.
“If you want to go far, you have to bring people around to your idea. It shouldn’t be about ‘me’. You want other people to come in to actually help take the idea to another place.”
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Written by Joaquin Victor Tacla
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