From Interswitch to Moniepoint, Oloruntoba Ojo is building Africa’s digital finance infrastructure

Africa’s fintech revolution has captured global attention, driven by the pursuit of financial inclusion and the rapid growth of digital payment ecosystems. While founders often dominate headlines, the evolution of this sector also rests on visionary engineers – individuals who combine deep technical expertise with an intimate understanding of the continent’s unique challenges.

Among them is Oloruntoba Ojo (Toba), as friends and colleagues fondly call him, a software engineer whose work underpins some of Africa’s most scalable and transformative fintech systems.

Toba’s journey is a testament to knowledge meeting opportunity. He earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Bowen University in Nigeria, followed by a Master of Science in Software Engineering with Distinction at Kingston University, UK.

Equipped with advanced skills, he returned to Nigeria, determined to build infrastructure capable of supporting a rapidly expanding digital economy.

His early career at Interswitch Group positioned him at the centre of Nigeria’s digital payment revolution.

Contributing to platforms like Verve World, Paycode, and Quickteller Mini, Toba helped design secure, user-friendly payment systems that became the backbone of digital finance adoption across the continent.

Toba Ojo

“Interswitch taught me that payments infrastructure is never just about technology,” Toba says. “It’s about trust, uptime, and the ability to scale. When systems work well, nobody notices, but when they fail, economies feel it immediately.”

In 2018, Toba joined Moniepoint (then TeamApt) as a Senior Software Engineer, rising to Head of Core Systems over seven years. In this role, he architected infrastructure capable of invisible scaling – handling exponential transaction growth while maintaining reliability and regulatory compliance.

His leadership ensured that Moniepoint’s systems could withstand macroeconomic disruptions, including the cash shortages of early 2023, without compromising service to merchants who depended on the platform for daily operations.

“At Moniepoint, the challenge was not just growth, but responsible growth,” he explains. “We were building systems that millions of businesses would depend on daily. That meant designing for failure, for regulation, for sudden spikes – and for a future we couldn’t fully predict yet.”

Toba’s technical mastery spans Enterprise Architecture, Systems Design, and implementation of high-performance, fault-tolerant systems. Rather than focusing solely on tools, he emphasises principles – modularity, fault tolerance, and long-term maintainability – because technologies change, but poorly designed systems accumulate cost over time.

“My goal has always been to build platforms that can evolve without breaking the businesses they support,” he says.

Beyond technical execution, Toba is a strategic leader who translates complex visions into market-ready solutions that fuel growth and inclusion. By designing infrastructure that supports millions of daily transactions, he enables African businesses to thrive, contributing directly to financial empowerment across the continent.

He also mentors emerging engineers, shaping the next generation of fintech architects in Africa.

As African fintech enters its next decade, engineers like Toba will remain the quiet but essential architects of innovation, designing the systems that make financial inclusion not just aspirational, but achievable.

His work exemplifies the type of engineering leadership and innovation that drives financial technology forward – not only in Africa but globally.

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