Post by Cowrywise

One afternoon in February, a journalist walked into our office to find out if we had lost our minds. We had just promoted 11 people to Associate Vice President in a company of less than 100 people. In Nigeria's tech ecosystem, that kind of move gets one of two labels: visionary or desperate. The journalist wanted to know which one we were. What he found was more complicated than either. He found a CFA Charterholder managing portfolios she'd previously managed at Chapel Hill Denham and Leadway Pensions. A risk manager who came from six years at KPMG and built our entire risk function from scratch, starting with a Google Form titled after a trending meme because he needed people to trust him. A designer who raised his hand as a university student in 2017 and now has his fingerprints on every visual element of an app that over two million Nigerians open. He found a company that realised, quietly and without announcement, that Razaq Ahmed, CFA and Edward Popoola cannot be everywhere. That founder dependency is an existential risk in Nigerian fintech. That a company managing money for two million people under SEC regulation needed people who owned their parts of the business, not in title, but in authority, in accountability, in the weight their words carry when they say something needs to stop. He found eleven people who were already doing the job before the title arrived. The title just made it official. We are not a company of 11 vice presidents and other employees. We are a company that decided, before it was fashionable, that the people building it deserved to own it. Read the full TechCabal piece here: https://lnkd.in/ejpcMrPU