ZonePay

Delivering to banks is slow by design. Regulation, approvals and long chains of sign-off meant a project could sit still for weeks, and nobody on the delivery team had the relationships to move it.

The Solutions Delivery team was performing well below its potential, and every stalled project made the next one harder to believe in. I knew it first hand. I had worked on the team as a project manager and lead project manager before I ran it.

I started with relationships, because nobody opens a door for a stranger. I built trust with the people and institutions that could unblock our work.

Then process. I studied how delivery really happened, cut the steps that added time and no value, and spotted risks early enough to fix them before they became issues. I also became the person the team could bring any problem to, and added monthly recognition for the top performer.

Within about three months, the team's average appraisal score went from 45% to 90%.

A team that is moving notices what others walk past. While planning a funds transfer product, we saw that transfers work well for paying a friend and badly for paying a merchant. The merchant had to wait for their own bank to credit the account before they were even told they had been paid.

So we reversed the order. Tell the merchant the moment the customer pays, with a payment confirmation they can trust, hand over the goods, and settle afterwards. For the customer it became one scan: a QR code opens their own banking app, and they confirm the amount and their PIN.

When delivery started there was no product, only a scope and an idea. Everything that normally happens one stage after another had to happen at the same time: planning, definition, build, integration and release.

A leading Nigerian bank integrated while we were still building. We started with the leanest version that could work and gave the bank documentation and APIs early, so they could test while we built the real product behind them. When their testing finished, the full product was ready on our staging environment, and we deployed to production so they could test live while their mobile app learned to respond to our deep links.

By the time their app was ready for the app store, the product behind it was done. In under three months it was built, integrated, delivered and live.

I led the delivery and sat at the centre of it. I worked directly with the bank, directed the delivery, and carried their feedback to the product and engineering teams so that all the parallel work kept pointing the same way.

I coordinated the whole team, kept timelines and requirements on track, and worked with the leadership on both the business and technology side. The marketing team that ran the pilot waited for my green light before going on site. After go-live, pilot issues came back to me, and I worked through them to keep the pilot seamless.

The first pilot ran at the University of Ibadan in 2025, as a progressive web app. Then it grew.

Customers can now link their bank accounts and pay from them, even when their own bank has not integrated with ZonePay. Merchants can accept payments on soundbox terminals, so the merchant hears the confirmation straight away, even if their bank is down. Merchants can also receive money into virtual accounts, and a normal transfer to one of them triggers the same soundbox. ZonePay now has its own native app on Android and iOS.

It is used by merchants and supported by banks across Nigeria. Most banks, including the digital banks, are integrated or on their way.