Adedeji Olowe

A few weeks ago, the “devil” made me do something I never knew I could do: I started building an internal HRMS for my team. Not because we couldn’t afford one. That part is important to highlight. But then, being a legendary cheapskate, maybe I couldn’t? You won’t know 🤐

We had been using Freshteam for a while, and like clockwork, Freshworks did what Google often does when they’re bored: announced they wouldn’t be supporting Freshteam anymore. So, we did what most sensible teams would do in that situation; find a safe harbor. We decided to move to Zoho.

I was sitting around quietly, minding my own business and then my CTO casually mentioned that with the Pro version of Codex from Open AI, we could pretty much build anything we wanted. That statement stayed with me longer than it should have; I ruminated over it like a hungry cow.

Because once you actually believe that, even for a second, it starts to make your existing decisions look a bit lazy. And then my HR comes in, not particularly patient about these things, and says we should just build our own system. I dragged my feet at first, mostly because building internal tools always sounds easier in theory than it plays out in practice. We eventually did it anyway. 

By April 1, we’re launching our own internal HRMS. Not a scrappy prototype, not a “good enough for now” system, but something that is genuinely better than what we were paying for. More aligned with how we work, more polished in the areas that actually matter to us, and without all the unnecessary bulk that comes with off-the-shelf tools trying to serve everyone at once. We are not commercializing it. At best, I might give it to a few friends for free and leave it at that.

But then I’m broke, maybe if someone gives me some benjamins, I could sell it to them, alongside a few of my annoying employees as extras 🤣.

Jokes apart, at a team lead meeting, someone asked a question that has been sitting at the back of my mind ever since: if we could build something as good as Freshteam, what exactly stops someone else from building something as good as Lendsqr?

That question is uncomfortable in a very precise way – like when your least favorite cousin’s annoying son asks if they could stay over your place for the summer. Because it forces you to confront something most people would rather avoid. The barrier to entry is thinning out in real time. And if you’re paying attention, you can feel it happening. But most people never pay attention, do they?

Everyone now has the same tools

When AI started becoming genuinely useful for writing and code, I was excited in the way most people were. It felt like the advantage had suddenly increased. Things that used to take days could now be done in hours, sometimes minutes.

One of my engineers even told a story where a team met a customer (not Lendsqr), and delivered a feature the customer wanted right on the call. It was crazy!

But that excitement didn’t last in its pure form. At some point, a more annoying thought crept in. The same capability I’m enjoying is not exclusive to me. It is available to my customers and even more dangerously, my competitors. It is available to people who want to compete with me but haven’t even started yet. It is available to customers who may decide one day that they no longer need us.

So the question becomes obvious. If everyone has access to the same tools, what actually separates outcomes? It is tempting to assume that equal access leads to equal results. That logic feels smart, but it does not survive even basic scrutiny. Baby dinosaurs like us from the 80s and 90s have seen this play out before when the internet first came to be.

We have always had access

Take writing as an example. Someone like J.K. Rowling did not emerge in a world where storytelling tools were scarce. Writing materials have been widely available for a long time. Today, it is even more extreme. Google Docs is free for anyone who can breathe. That is over two billion people with access to a writing tool that is more powerful than what many professionals used less than a decade ago.

Yet the number of people who actually sit down, stay with an idea, and turn it into a complete, coherent novel remains very small. And the few who do are writing such crap you could suffer from a bad case of nausea. It is not because people lack ideas; ideas are cheap and widely distributed. It is also not because people lack tools; the tools are sitting in their pockets.

The gap comes from something far less glamorous. Most people do not have the discipline to continue once the initial excitement fades. The largest middle stretch of any meaningful project is usually boring, frustrating, and slow. That is where most attempts quietly die and I guess, if god’s real, he designed it that way.

You see the same pattern everywhere else. People start YouTube channels, record a few videos, share them with friends, and then disappear. Not because the platform stopped working or because the camera failed them. They simply lost the will to continue when it stopped being immediately rewarding.

AI does not fix that problem. If anything, it quite frankly exposes it more clearly.

So what actually matters now

After sitting with all of this for a while, I keep arriving at the same conclusion, and it is one that becomes harder to ignore the more you pay attention to how people actually work. AI tends to amplify people who already move with intent, and in practice, that amplification shows up unevenly because not everyone brings the same level of intent into the process.

From what I have observed, there are a few traits that consistently show up in people who are able to extract real value from these tools, and they are not particularly new or exotic. They have always mattered, but AI has a way of making their absence more obvious.

Agency: the part no one can automate for you

This is the most visible factor, and somehow still the one people sidestep the most. Nothing really progresses without someone deciding to take action and following through on it, and that reality has stayed constant even as the tools around us have improved. What has changed is how little friction now exists between intention and execution, which makes inaction stand out more sharply than it used to.

It is difficult to ignore how often people still operate below even this new baseline. You see CVs that are poorly structured and clearly rushed, even though it takes very little effort to clean them up with the tools available today. You remind someone to submit something important and they still find a way to delay it without any real constraint forcing that delay.

We are operating in an environment where rewriting, refining, and structuring output can happen almost instantly, yet that small initial step still does not happen as often as it should. At that point, the constraint reveals itself quite clearly as a matter of willingness rather than capability.

AI responds to direction, and without that initial push, there is nothing for it to build on. The system does not originate effort on your behalf, so whatever momentum exists still has to come from you.

Taste: knowing when something is actually good

This one is less talked about, but it shows up everywhere once you start paying attention. You don’t need to be wildly creative to have taste, you just need to carry a clear internal standard that pushes you to look at something and say this is not good enough yet, this can still be better. That simple insistence on quality is where a lot of the difference comes from.

You’ll be very surprised how many people don’t have taste. I’ve seen wealthy people, especially in Nigeria, who can afford anything and still end up building and living in complete rubbish. The quality of what comes out at the end does not match the resources that went in, and you see the same thing with clothes where people spend good money with tailors and still end up with something poorly sewn.

So even when the materials are there and the money is there, the outcome still falls short because nobody is really steering it toward something better.

AI behaves in a similar way. It will give you something that works and something that looks acceptable, but if you don’t push it further with a clear sense of what “good” looks like, it will settle there. And when it settles there, you end up with something that feels common, which means it does not stand out in any meaningful way.

By the way, taste isn’t about perfection. Far from it, it’s putting the extra efforts, within immediate control, to release things that can be as good as you could push it, NOW! 

Grit: staying long enough for it to get good

There is also the matter of staying with something long enough for it to mature into what you actually had in mind.

Very few outputs land exactly where you want them on the first attempt, especially when you are working with something as iterative as AI. You start with a prompt, get a response that is close but incomplete, and then begin the process of refining, adjusting, and pushing it further. That loop is where most of the real work happens, and it demands a level of patience that many people underestimate.

When that patience is missing, the process gets cut short and the output remains shallow. When it is present, you begin to see the compounding effect of small improvements, each one bringing the result closer to something that feels deliberate and well-formed.

The system itself does not carry that process forward independently. It does not return to your work unprompted or continue refining in the background. The continuity has to come from you, which means the outcome is tightly linked to how long you are willing to stay engaged.

Curiosity: the engine behind improvement

The last piece, which often sits underneath everything else, is curiosity. People who get the most out of AI tend to engage with it in a more exploratory way. They are not just issuing instructions and moving on; they are probing, questioning, and trying to understand why something works the way it does. They push on responses, test variations, and look for ways to improve what they are seeing.

That orientation changes how the tool gets used. Instead of settling for the first acceptable output, they treat it as a starting point and keep working it until it aligns more closely with what they had in mind.

Without that curiosity, usage tends to stay at a surface level, where outputs are generated quickly but rarely developed further. Over time, that produces work that blends into everything else, because it follows the same obvious paths without any real effort to go beyond them. If you never push the envelope, how do you know how far you could go or what you could discover?

The nasty and unfriendly conclusion, and where you and I land on it

AI is going to make the top 1% dramatically better, and the distance between them and everyone else will grow in a way that becomes hard to ignore.

That outcome follows the same pattern we’ve always seen. The tools are now widely available, but agency, taste, grit, and curiosity are not evenly distributed, and those are the things that actually determine what gets built and how far it goes. Some new people will break into that top 1% because they know how to use these tools properly, and some of the people sitting comfortably at the top will fall out because they were there due to structural advantages rather than genuine excellence. The composition will change, but the gap itself will remain.

For example, just this morning, one of my children, a world-class security expert, told me he vibe-coded a Drata/Vanta replacement, got on a call with a CISO and sold it for $20k 🤯. If I could net $20k every weekend, I shall turn Mondays to Fridays to weekend days as well.

Just a month ago, my good friend and the co-founder of Carbon, Ngozi Dozie, had chronicled what he did with just a $20 Claude Code subscription. He was addicted but in a positive way – he found freedom and tasted the forbidden fruit. 

But for me, personally, here’s the sober truth and this is less of an abstract observation and more of a direct challenge I’ve placed in front of myself. If the tools are this good, and the access is this open, and I still cannot produce something that is genuinely world-class, then I have to be honest about what that means. It means the problem was never the tools and it points back to whether I actually have the agency to do the work, the taste to know when it is good, the grit to stay with it, and the curiosity to keep pushing it further.

I intend to find out, and I’m choosing to believe the answer is yes. And I think that choice, made deliberately, held onto stubbornly, and acted on consistently is exactly what separates the people who will thrive in what’s coming from the people who will spend the next decade wondering why AI didn’t do more for them. May that never be my case.

Nigeria’s economic ambition is no longer in doubt. The Tinubu-led administration has been explicit about its goal to build a one trillion-dollar economy and lift millions of citizens out of poverty. Infrastructure, security, education, and productivity all feature prominently in this agenda. Yet history offers a clear lesson: no country has achieved sustained, broad-based growth without a functional and accessible credit system that serves households and small businesses at scale.

Credit is not a peripheral financial product. It is an economic infrastructure which determines whether families can smooth income shocks, whether entrepreneurs can expand beyond subsistence, and whether productivity gains translate into lasting wealth. In Nigeria, this infrastructure remains underdeveloped, shaped by years of fragmented coordination across institutions and stakeholders.

Over recent years, government action has increasingly recognized the importance of credit. Reforms in taxation, initiatives to reduce friction in business operations, the introduction of student loans, and the creation of CrediCorp all signal intent. The introduction of e-invoicing, while primarily designed to improve VAT and withholding tax visibility, also lays foundational infrastructure for future credit use cases. These are positive steps. However, they exist as individual responses to specific problems rather than as components of a coherent national credit strategy.

The result is a system that moves in parts but not in unison. Banks, fintechs, moneylenders, state licensing authorities, consumer protection agencies, and credit bureaus all perform legitimate roles, yet they operate without a shared national direction. Credit activity exists across the system, but it is not structured in a way that allows gains in one area to reinforce progress in another. While there are visible pockets of improvement, these advances have not translated into sustained scale or system-wide momentum.

Nigeria’s underlying fundamentals are strong. The population is young and entrepreneurial. Digital adoption continues to lower barriers to participation in commerce and finance. Where credit is structured and coordinated, particularly in corporate and infrastructure finance, the system works. Large companies and major projects can access capital through established banking channels, supported by the Central Bank of Nigeria. This is not where the national gap lies.

The real constraint sits at the base of the economy. Consumer and SME credit, the segment that touches the largest number of Nigerians, remains fragmented, inconsistent, and structurally weak. This is the layer that determines whether households build resilience and whether small businesses transition from survival to growth. Without national alignment, this segment cannot perform its economic role, no matter how active individual lenders may be.

Oversight is part of the challenge. Banks and deposit-taking institutions fall under the CBN. State governments license moneylenders. The FCCPC rightly protects consumers from abusive practices. These mandates do not conflict, but they do not converge into a single system designed to support national economic objectives. Fragmentation increases costs, weakens accountability, and limits responsible expansion of credit.

Risk is unevenly distributed. Borrowers benefit from growing consumer protections, while lenders, particularly private and digital lenders, operate without predictable recovery mechanisms. National tools such as the Global Standing Instruction remain limited to commercial banks, even though non-bank lenders now provide a significant share of consumer and SME credit. This imbalance discourages formalization, raises the cost of lending, and ultimately constrains access.

Data is another fault line. Credit bureau coverage remains below 20 percent of Nigeria’s adult population. A modern credit economy cannot function in partial darkness. Without comprehensive reporting, lenders cannot price risk accurately, regulators cannot monitor systemic exposure, and borrowers cannot build verifiable credit histories that follow them across institutions.

What Nigeria lacks is not regulation, institutions, or private capital. It lacks a unifying national credit policy, one that clarifies priorities, aligns regulators, and defines how consumer and SME credit should support productivity, stability, and long-term wealth creation.

Such a policy would not require new regulators or the repeal of existing laws. Its value lies in coherence. It would articulate national expectations for productive credit, align oversight bodies under shared outcomes, strengthen borrower protections across all lending channels, and extend credible recovery mechanisms to compliant lenders. It would treat credit data as shared national infrastructure, not a commercial afterthought.

Crucially, a national credit policy would introduce discipline alongside access. Sustainable inclusion depends on both. When willful default carries no consequence, responsible borrowers and compliant lenders are penalized. Fair, transparent discipline, clearly distinguishing hardship from abuse, protects the integrity of the system and expands access over time.

Credit, when coordinated, becomes a multiplier. Households plan with confidence. Small businesses invest and hire. Government interventions reinforce rather than dilute one another. Without cohesion, credit activity continues, but its impact remains uneven and limited.

Nigeria already possesses many of the building blocks required to support a modern credit economy. Banks, regulators, credit bureaus, digital lenders, and enforcement mechanisms all exist in some form. What remains unresolved is how these components are expected to function together within a clearly articulated national framework. In the absence of such alignment, credit-related interventions remain fragmented, and their collective impact on wealth creation and productivity remains limited.

A unified National Credit Policy would provide that missing structure. It would not function as a new regulation or replace existing laws. Instead, it would serve as a formal policy position of government, defining how consumer and SME credit should operate as economic infrastructure and outlining the responsibilities of regulators, lenders, employers, and public institutions within that system. By doing so, it would convert isolated interventions into a coordinated national credit agenda and formally position consumer and SME credit as a pillar of long-term economic growth.

Such a policy must go beyond high-level intent. It should issue clear directives that anchor credit discipline within public and private life. For example, access to national recovery tools such as the Global Standing Instruction should be explicitly extended to all compliant lenders under a common framework. Credit reporting should become foundational to credit enforceability, with loans required to be reported to licensed credit bureaus before they can be pursued through formal recovery or judicial processes. This would strengthen data integrity, reduce abuse, and improve confidence across the system.

The policy should also embed credit responsibility institutionally. Government employment, appointments, and access to public intervention programs can reasonably incorporate credit bureau checks as part of character and compliance assessments. Employers, particularly in regulated sectors, can be encouraged to adopt similar practices within the boundaries of existing labor and data protection laws. These measures do not criminalize financial distress. They reinforce the principle that access to credit carries obligations, and that persistent abuse weakens the system for everyone.

Finally, a National Credit Policy should explicitly mandate sustained public awareness efforts. Credit remains widely misunderstood in Nigeria, often viewed solely as a last resort or a trap rather than a tool for productivity and stability. Coordinated education efforts, supported by lenders, banks, and public institutions, would help normalize responsible borrowing and repayment as part of economic citizenship. When credit is understood, visible, and consistently enforced, it begins to function as shared infrastructure rather than a contested battleground.

At Nigeria’s current stage of economic ambition, alignment of this nature is no longer theoretical but the difference between credit activity that exists in isolation and a credit system that supports wealth creation at scale.

This was also published at Thisday.

It’s an interesting time to be alive, and 2026 will be a year where markets grow, regulators growl, and bad belle people might not have a chance to crow.

Here are my predictions for digital payments in 2026. Who am I to even make these predictions? Well, I’ve been balalawoing for about 10 years and I mostly miss my predictions, so I guess I should try again.

#1 Stablecoin implodes in America and takes Africa down with it

Moving money in and out of Africa is a bitch of work. Many times when customers need to pay me or Lendsqr, it takes days, during which I have found myself homeless, broke, and living under Oshodi Bridge.

Stablecoins solve this problem. But since Trump legalized crypto, what he failed to do is download common sense or solve greed. One or two stablecoin providers will take on more than their reserves, and things will crash.

Unfortunately, while Westerners have safety nets, millions of young African professionals and SMEs will see their stablecoin balances disappear into space. Ekun ma po repete.

#2 Massive payments growth as fraud says goodbye

With fraud no longer a major distraction following CBN strict regulatory interventions and consumer trust being rebuilt, fintech giants and wannabes will return to massive growth and innovation. The market could double this year alone.

What’s driving the growth? Last-mile payments, consumer credit, and the usual suspects.

#3 CBN finally wins cashless

Someone at the CBN finally understood the logic of cashless. Instead of punishing deposits, it shifted penalties to the right behavior: 3% when you kiss cash too many times.

As more money goes into banks but becomes expensive to take out, the default behavior becomes digital. The CBN is also not keen on creating ₦2k, ₦5k, and ₦10k notes. Cashless galore.

#4 Tax evidence drives consumer and SME lending

The days of salary workers and SMEs lying about income to get loans they can’t or won’t repay are over. With the NRS getting more serious about tax collection, tax records become a verifiable signal of income for salaried workers and revenue for companies.

Expect data providers to start plugging this in within weeks.

#5 Nigerian government codifies a national credit policy

Tinubu understands credit and has pushed significant policies to make it available to students, SMEs, and others. He has also gotten us more indebted. If the loans are productive, who cares?

However, Nigeria lacks a cohesive national credit policy. Given how strategic the president has been on tax and fiscal reform, this could happen before the year ends.

#6 CBN opens GSI to non-bank lenders

With or without a national consumer credit policy, the CBN will want to extend its headmaster game by allowing non-bank lenders access to loan recovery via GSI.

It serves the CBN well. Their data guys won’t need to cook numbers about credit in Nigeria because they’ll see everything. Win-win-lose. The losers, obviously, are chronic debtors.

#7 Moniepoint and OPay go commercial

Rumors of Moniepoint going commercial have been around longer than December got detty. Many factors are probably driving this: eyeing the extra money in traditional core banking, and wanting to sit at the table of elders.

OPay has always liked operating strategically without a face. But I suspect they’ve become so big that the CBN will have no option but to ask them to upgrade licenses and governance for better oversight.

#8 Invoice factoring and discounting explode

With e-invoicing now compulsory and live for most companies, invoice factoring and discounting will explode significantly.

If you don’t know what those terms mean, please use ChatGPT or Google. I’m tired of explaining.

#9 Many try to fix direct debit, fail

Direct debit is supposed to solve loan repayments and recurring payments. NIBSS promised heaven but is currently serving hell.

Some fintechs will try to fix this by launching their own direct debit systems, but they’ll face the same issues that screwed NIBSS: integrating with banks one by one is brutal, and many banks are not serious about integration.

You might be doing Happy New Year 2036 in some bank server rooms and still not be done.

#10 PayPal succeeds despite backlash from spurned Nigerians

Everyone is dunking on PayPal for coming to Africa after previously shitting on us. Guess what: the average African doesn’t remember the old insult or care.

They will sign up, use PayPal, and enjoy a significantly better service than many African alternatives.

Sad.

Wondering what happened the previous years and the predictions? Read about my takes for 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025.

Whenever I hear people talk about crypto as the answer to Africa’s international remittances and payments problems, I usually laugh, and that reaction comes from familiarity rather than dismissal. I have spent enough time around payments, banking, and cross-border flows to know that enthusiasm often grows fastest where the real problem has not been fully understood. 

Stablecoins and crypto works, and many of the people building in that space are smart and well-intentioned, but what they are addressing sits adjacent to the issue Africa keeps running into, not at the center of it. Yet the conversation keeps circling back to crypto as though speed and new tooling automatically translate into economic relief, and that assumption is where things start to fall apart.

I will explain why I see it this way, but I need to begin from a place that is personal, uncomfortable, and grounded in lived experience, because abstract arguments about systems and markets tend to miss the human context that shapes how I think about these things.

This is not cynicism but experience

Over the past few years, I have watched too many people I know battle cancer, including people I loved deeply and people who deserved far better endings than they got.Anyone who has been close to that kind of sickness understands one thing very quickly. Pain management and healing are not the same thing. Pain can be managed, sometimes so effectively that it almost disappears, while the illness itself continues its work beneath the surface. You can give someone morphine which will bring genuine relief, even dramatic relief, but it does nothing to remove the cancer. The comfort is real, and so is the damage still happening quietly in the background.

That is exactly how I listen to most conversations about crypto and stablecoins in cross border payments across Africa. There is relief in speed, convenience, and temporary workarounds, and that relief should not be dismissed or mocked. At the same time, the structural problem that created the pain in the first place remains firmly in place, and no amount of faster movement changes the fact that it has not been addressed. 

International remittance problems are not only a technology problem

Countries trade with each other, and trade runs on currencies, which is the part most people already understand at a surface level. What tends to get glossed over is which currencies actually matter once you move beyond theory and into volume. The global system still runs primarily on the dollar, with the euro playing a strong supporting role in certain regions and corridors. China has spent years trying to position the Yuan as a global settlement currency, and despite the size of its economy and its growing influence, that effort remains ongoing and far from fully realised.

When a country exports goods or services, foreign currency flows in. When it imports, that currency flows out. At the national level, the country ends up acting as a single economic body representing the combined activity of its citizens, companies, and institutions in that exchange. This is why the balance of trade matters so much in practice. It is not an abstract economic concept reserved for textbooks or policy papers. Balance of trade determines whether an economy has room to breathe or is constantly operating under pressure.

When imports consistently outpace exports, especially over extended periods, foreign currency inevitably becomes scarce. That scarcity shows up everywhere, from restrictions and delays to volatility and policy interventions. No amount of clever routing, faster settlement, or new payment technology changes that underlying problem, because the constraint sits in how much value the country earns relative to how much it spends.

Why some currencies are locked down and others are allowed to roam

This is where many African and LATAM countries find themselves today. When export earnings remain weak and economies lean heavily on imports, governments tend to respond in the few ways available to them. Currency controls begin to appear in different forms, whether through pegs, spending limits, approval processes, or outright restrictions. These measures rarely come from malice or ignorance. They emerge because foreign exchange is limited, demand keeps rising, and policymakers are trying to ration what little is available across competing needs.

More productive economies tend to operate under very different conditions. When individuals and businesses are consistently selling goods and services to international customers at scale, governments have far less reason to intervene aggressively in currency flows. Oversight still exists, usually centred on KYC, AML, and compliance standards, but there is less anxiety about money moving in and out of the system. The underlying economic activity provides enough buffer for inflows and outflows to happen without triggering instability.

That gap between these two realities has very little to do with the technology used to move money around. It is shaped by how much value an economy creates, how much of that value is sold beyond its borders, and how reliably those earnings replenish the pool of foreign exchange over time.

Nigeria is a perfect, uncomfortable example

Nigeria illustrates this dynamic better than any theory ever could. For years, the country spent staggering amounts of foreign exchange importing refined petroleum, a dependency that quietly hollowed out reserves and distorted almost every part of the financial system. That pressure showed up in familiar ways, from tight dollar limits and card restrictions to an endless stream of circulars attempting to manage scarcity through policy. The strain was constant, and everyone in the system felt it.

When Dangote’s refinery finally came onstream, that single development began to shift the equation. The country stopped bleeding foreign exchange at the same scale, and the immediate pressure on dollar supply started to ease. Almost overnight, banks that had been vocal about controls found room to relax some of them. Monthly international spending limits moved from painfully zero to figures running into thousands of dollars, reflecting a change in underlying conditions rather than any sudden improvement in banking infrastructure.

The dollars did not appear out of thin air, and nothing magical happened behind the scenes. The difference came from reducing a massive and recurring drain on foreign exchange, which created space in the system and reminded everyone how closely currency stability is tied to what a country produces and pays for.

Where the dollars actually sit, and why that matters

Another detail that rarely gets said plainly is where international money actually lives in practice. When countries engage in global trade through imports and exports, the foreign currency earned does not sit in some abstract national vault. It sits as external reserves held with correspondent banks, usually large international institutions such as JP Morgan, CitiBank, and others operating at that level. These accounts form the practical storage of a country’s foreign exchange and are the same pools of money used to settle international payments, support trade finance, and meet cross border obligations. When exports are consistent and meaningful, those reserves are replenished and remain stable. When exports slow or fall short, the balances thin out, and every outward payment begins to carry more weight and scrutiny.

This is why external reserves matter far beyond headline numbers. They determine how much real liquidity a country has access to when settling international obligations. You can build the fastest payment application in the world and design systems that move value in milliseconds, but speed alone does not refill those correspondent accounts where reserves are held. If the balances underneath are running low, scale becomes impossible regardless of how efficient the front end looks. This is the part of the conversation that stablecoin advocates tend to skip past too quickly, even though it sits at the heart of how international money actually works.

Stablecoins are a bypass, not a cure

Stablecoins can bypass parts of the traditional financial system, and that bypass can be genuinely useful in the right context. At a basic level, a stablecoin is a digital token designed to maintain a one to one value with a fiat currency, most commonly the US dollar. Issuers claim this stability is achieved by holding reserves that mirror the value of the tokens in circulation. 

In theory, every dollar-denominated stablecoin should be backed by actual dollar assets held somewhere in custody. This structure allows stablecoins to move quickly across borders while maintaining a familiar unit of account, which explains why they reduce friction, move faster than many legacy processes, and feel modern to users who have grown tired of delays and paperwork. At small to medium volumes, especially for freelancers, startups, and specific cross border use cases, they can solve real problems and deliver tangible value.

Once you look closely at how this backing is supposed to work, the picture becomes less comforting. Stablecoins are expected to be backed one hundred percent by real dollar assets, whether cash, short term treasuries, or similar instruments. Whether that backing exists in full, in real time, and under stress remains an open question. 

The system only truly gets tested when something breaks, because redemption pressure is the moment when backing either proves itself or collapses. Until a major liquidity event forces large scale redemptions, confidence rests largely on disclosures, attestations, and trust in the issuer rather than direct verification.

Money also has to move into and out of stablecoins through ramps, and those ramps matter more than most people admit. To mint a stablecoin, someone has to deposit actual dollars through a bank or payment provider. To exit, the process reverses, with the issuer paying out dollars from its reserves. These on and off ramps remain tightly coupled to the traditional banking system, correspondent accounts, and regulatory oversight.

At a national level, adoption runs into the same constraint almost immediately. If a country does not earn enough foreign exchange and a large share of participants begin moving value outward through stablecoins, the imbalance becomes visible very quickly. Money leaves faster than it comes in, and the question that surfaces is unavoidable. Where are the dollars backing this activity supposed to originate from? Technology offers no answer to that problem, because it sits firmly in the domain of economics.

Speed is impressive but settlement is everything

I am not dismissing technology or innovation. I have benefited directly from how efficient modern payment systems can be when the foundations are in place. I remember being in Portugal and trying to pay for garri and egusi when my card refused to work and the ATM was uncooperative. 

I had to transfer money from my UK account to the seller’s Portuguese account, and the funds arrived instantly, without drama or delay. Who knows, if the transaction hadn’t gone through as quickly as it did, I’d have had to compensate by washing as many dishes as my meal had cost.  

That experience felt seamless because settlement already existed behind the scenes. The liquidity was present, the correspondent relationships were intact, and the systems trusted each other. Speed came at the end of the chain, not at the beginning. This is where people often confuse switches with substance. Moving money quickly looks impressive, but having money available to move remains the harder and more consequential problem.

Why crypto breaks under real volume

There is another uncomfortable reality that rarely gets enough attention. The largest importers in most African countries operate in heavily regulated environments. Car importers, manufacturers, and large distributors sit squarely within formal systems that are monitored closely by regulators. They cannot simply decide to reroute billions in settlements through crypto without running straight into legal and compliance barriers. In many jurisdictions, the law around crypto remains unclear or openly restrictive, which limits how far these guys can go.

If those same actors attempted to push their full transaction volumes through crypto without strong underlying trade inflows to support them, the system would come under stress almost immediately. The liquidity required to sustain that level of activity is not there, and the backing needed to absorb those flows simply does not exist. The model holds together at the margins, but once real volume enters the picture, the limits become impossible to ignore.

Wishing people well, without confusing the problem

I genuinely wish crypto builders well, just as I wish policymakers well and hope that every country working to improve its economic situation succeeds. None of what I am saying comes from bitterness, fear of change, or a desire to hold on to old systems for their own sake. Innovation matters, experimentation matters, and progress almost always comes from people trying new things in imperfect conditions.

At the same time, we have to be honest with ourselves about what we are actually fixing. There is a difference between easing discomfort and addressing the source of the pain, and that distinction matters when the stakes involve entire economies rather than individual transactions. Faster movement, cleaner interfaces, and clever workarounds can offer relief, sometimes meaningful relief, but they do not alter the fundamentals that created the pressure in the first place.

Crypto can move money faster, reduce friction, and make life easier for certain users operating at specific scales. What it does not change is a broken balance of trade, weak export capacity, or decades of structural economic decisions that continue to shape currency availability. Until those deeper issues shift, every new solution, no matter how elegant it appears, will eventually run into the same limits. And when that happens, we should not pretend to be surprised.

Over the last nine months, and very much in line with what I predicted at the start of the year, the Central Bank of Nigeria has been engaged in a sustained and deliberate effort to confront fraud across the financial system. It has not been loud, it has not been performative, and it has not relied on dramatic announcements designed to impress headlines. 

What has happened instead feels intentional and steady, driven by new leadership at the top of the bank and reinforced by renewed seriousness across several departments that matter deeply to payments, banking supervision, and financial stability.

If you have spent enough time building or operating financial products in Nigeria, you quickly learn that this country has never lacked rules. Our regulatory frameworks around KYC and CDD are solid. 

They are detailed, well documented, and in many respects comparable to what you find in markets people like to call more advanced. The challenge has always lived elsewhere. It lives in what happens after those rules exist, in how consistently they are applied, and in whether anyone feels genuine pressure to enforce them when enforcement becomes inconvenient.

For a long time, the gap between regulation and enforcement created a permissive environment. People learned what they could get away with. Fraudsters, in particular, understood the system extremely well. They observed patterns, tested boundaries, and refined their methods based on the absence of consequences. 

Over time, fraud became easier to execute and harder to reverse. Banks lost money. Customers lost money. Ordinary Nigerians received messages and emails from people pretending to be trusted contacts. Funds moved quickly across institutions, and by the time anyone reacted, the trail had usually gone cold.

When fraud happened and urgency was optional

One of the most revealing aspects of the system during that era was how banks responded or failed to respond once fraud occurred. Reporting a stolen fund often felt like shouting into a void, and there was rarely a sense of urgency, accountability, or even recognition that the problem mattered beyond the immediate customer. The processes were slow, the communication was minimal, and the expectation was that you would wait indefinitely while your money effectively disappeared.

We experienced this first-hand on September 1, 2023. Lendsqr was hit by a fraud attack. The amount lost was small, nothing that could have threatened the business, but the experience was enough to show how broken the response system was. We immediately escalated the incident via email to one of the largest banks in Nigeria, fully expecting a structured investigation to kick off. The response we received was silence. Days passed. Nothing happened. It was only when I called on the personal intervention of an executive director at the bank that the situation started moving. The layers of bureaucracy that normally slow everything down were suddenly cut through, and we got resolution.

That incident leaves a lasting impression because it forces a sobering question. If it takes access to someone at the very top to resolve a fraud case within a reasonable timeframe, how do ordinary Nigerians ever recover their funds or even get proper attention? Most people have no idea who an executive director is. They don’t have informal channels to escalate issues. They submit complaints, receive reference numbers, and are left waiting while funds vanish. Confidence erodes, frustration sets in, and resignation becomes the default response.

This environment created a culture where fraud felt low risk to those committing it. The system’s slow pace and lack of coordination made it almost predictable. Criminals learned that moving money quickly and quietly often guaranteed they could escape before anyone cared enough to intervene. Experiencing that personally, as someone deeply embedded in the ecosystem, reinforces how critical consistent enforcement is, and why the changes the CBN has implemented over the past months are not just welcome but are essential for the survival of trust in Nigerian payments.

The moment enforcement became real for everyone

The mechanics of fraud exploitation were predictable. Funds would be taken from one account and moved rapidly across multiple banks. Sometimes recipient banks would attempt intervention, assuming the right teams were engaged early enough. In many cases, the funds would pass through fintech platforms as well, adding another layer of complexity and finger-pointing. Responsibility became fragmented. Each institution focused narrowly on its own exposure, while the broader flow continued unchecked.

This fragmentation allowed fraud to scale. Speed worked in favour of bad actors. By the time investigations began, money had already changed hands multiple times. Recovery became unlikely, and lessons rarely translated into systemic fixes.

The tone changed when the CBN decided to enforce existing rules in a way that affected everyone involved. There was a notable case involving one of Nigeria’s oldest and largest banks, where fraudulent funds moved through multiple institutions. Instead of allowing the usual back-and-forth, the CBN debited every bank that had received the funds and reversed the transaction chain.

That single action landed heavily across the industry. It demonstrated that tracing and reversing fraud was possible when the regulator chose to act decisively. It also made it clear that participation in the chain carried consequences, regardless of where the fraud originated.

At the same time, it was obvious that isolated interventions would not be enough. Fraud at scale requires systemic responses, and what followed was far more important than any one enforcement action.

Moving from reactions to structure and consistency

Over the months that followed, the CBN introduced and enforced a series of coordinated measures aimed at the most common fraud pathways. These changes did not arrive all at once. They were layered gradually, touching different parts of the ecosystem.

POS operations received increased scrutiny, which forced banks to become far more serious about merchant onboarding and monitoring. This focus makes practical sense, because cash conversion remains a critical exit point for fraudulent funds. When those exits narrow, the economics of fraud begin to change.

Banks were also given explicit responsibilities and timelines when fraud is reported, even in scenarios where customers were misled through impersonation or social engineering. Investigations now operate within defined windows, with a maximum of 14 days, and immediate containment actions expected within 48 hours. This clarity matters because it removes ambiguity around accountability.

Banks hold people’s money under license. That responsibility carries obligations that extend beyond processing transactions. KYC requirements exist to ensure institutions understand who their customers are and how they behave financially. When a customer profile suggests low income activity and sudden, large transaction volumes appear, that discrepancy should trigger action long before fraud becomes a headline.

Excuses such as being unable to locate a customer after the act reflect deeper failures in compliance and monitoring. Fraudulent activities are not edge cases, they are precisely the scenarios these institutions are designed to expect and address.

Why this fight mattered for the entire ecosystem

Over the past few months, fraud volumes have declined noticeably. This shift has little to do with goodwill and everything to do with friction. When funny money becomes harder to move, harder to convert to cash, and harder to hide across institutions, fraudulent activity loses momentum.

Limits on cash withdrawals, tighter controls around fund movement, and closer monitoring have all contributed to this outcome. Some measures, like proposed GPS requirements on merchant POS, proved difficult to implement at scale and remain unresolved. 

That experimentation is part of the regulatory process, and not every idea will translate cleanly into practice. What matters is that enforcement has become consistent enough to influence behaviour.

This consistency matters because Nigeria’s payments infrastructure is one of the few areas where the country consistently punches above its weight. It supports commerce, enables innovation, and underpins everyday economic activity. Allowing fraud to spiral unchecked would have undermined trust at a foundational level. Once trust erodes, recovery takes years.

By intervening when it did, the CBN protected something bigger than individual transactions. It preserved confidence in digital payments and gave builders room to focus on long-term value creation rather than constant damage control.

Credit where it is due

It is important to acknowledge the work being done within the CBN. Directors across payments supervision, payment policy, banking supervision, and related departments have taken on the hard task of enforcement, not just policy drafting. Rules were backed by action, and action produced results. 

As fraud pressure continues to ease, the ecosystem gains breathing room. Founders, banks, and fintech operators can invest energy into building safer, more sustainable solutions that serve real needs. Nigeria already has users and attention. With stronger enforcement backing the system, there is a real opportunity to channel that scale into durable progress.

That, more than anything, is why this fight against fraud matters.