Dotun Adekunle: At OPay, Technology Remains Our Engine for Driving Financial Inclusion across Africa

In this interview with Sunday Ehigiator, the Chief Operating Officer/Chief Technology Officer of OPay, Dotun Daniel Adekunle, reiterates that technology remains the driving force behind the company’s push to deepen financial inclusion across Africa, as the fintech deploys artificial intelligence, advanced security systems and digital infrastructure to expand access to fast, secure and seamless financial services

OPay has grown into one of Nigeria’s largest digital banking platforms, serving tens of millions of users. What technological architecture has enabled the platform to scale while maintaining reliability and speed?

Our architecture was designed around a simple customer promise: when a Nigerian taps “Send,” the money must move, every time, in seconds. Everything else flows from that. Technically, we run a distributed, microservices-based platform. Each service- wallets, transfers, cards, bills, agent banking- scales independently, so during salary weekends or festive peaks, we scale what’s under pressure without touching the rest. Three principles guide us: redundancy at every layer, so there’s no single point of failure; asynchronous processing, so a spike in one product never queues behind another; and relentless performance engineering; we measure latency in milliseconds, because a customer at a POS terminal feels every one of them. But customers don’t buy architecture. They buy trust. The architecture is simply how we keep our promise at the scale of tens of millions.

System downtime can significantly impact customer trust in digital banking. What measures has OPay put in place to ensure high system availability, business continuity, and operational resilience?

We treat availability as a product feature because we are very much aware that downtimes are not just technical inconveniences but a breach of trust. We cannot afford to allow a customer to be locked out of their own money for minutes – they will remember it for years. Our resilience rests on redundant infrastructure across multiple availability zones, progressive software rollouts that catch defects before they become incidents, real-time monitoring of thousands of health signals with automatic failover, and live disaster recovery drills. Beyond our over 99 per cent availability, the metric I personally watch is how fast a transaction completes during our busiest hour, because that is where customers actually experience resilience.

Cyber threats are becoming increasingly sophisticated. How does OPay protect customer data and financial transactions against evolving cybersecurity risks?

Guarding people’s life savings demands that security be engineered in, not bolted on, a point I made on cybersecurity at the CBN’s Payments System Vision 2028 launch. At the platform level, our defence is layered: advanced threat detection, encryption in transit and at rest, independent penetration testing, Industry Standard certification, and zero-trust access internally.  But security must also live where the customer lives, so we built the now well-known nine OPay security features that protect customers at the frontline: Large Transaction Shield, Large Transaction Double Check, USSD Lock, Online Subscription Control, Location Guard, Emergency Lock, Scam Alert, Safety PIN and Night Guard. Powerful protection, directly in the customer’s hands, from our data centres to their fingertips. And because many breaches begin with social engineering, not clever code, we invest heavily in awareness for staff, merchants, agents and customers: we will never ask for your PIN or OTP, and we say so constantly.

Digital fraud remains one of the biggest challenges in the fintech ecosystem. How is OPay leveraging artificial intelligence, machine learning, or other emerging technologies to detect and prevent fraudulent activities in real time?

Fraud today is industrialised, organised, adaptive, fast. Rules-based systems can’t keep pace because fraudsters study the rules. Machine learning studies the fraudsters. Our fraud engine scores every transaction in real time, in milliseconds, before it completes, using hundreds of signals: behavioural patterns, device fingerprints, transaction velocity, deviations from a customer’s habits.  Graph-based analysis then lets us fight fraud at the network level, identifying and dismantling webs of connected mule accounts, not just single bad transactions. And the goal is that honest customers never notice any of it; the fraudulent transaction stops, the legitimate one sails through.

Innovation often involves balancing speed with security. How does OPay ensure that new products and features are introduced without compromising platform stability or customer protection?

I reject the idea that it’s a trade-off. Speed without safety is recklessness; safety without speed is irrelevant. The discipline is to build safety into the delivery pipeline, so moving fast and moving safely become the same motion. Every product passes security review and threat modelling at the design stage; it’s cheaper to fix a flaw on a whiteboard than in production. Our pipeline enforces automated testing, security scanning and staged rollouts as non-negotiable gates. The evidence: we’re releasing faster than ever, and the platform has become more stable, not less.

Nigeria’s financial ecosystem continues to evolve rapidly. How has OPay’s technology infrastructure adapted to changing regulatory requirements while maintaining seamless customer experiences?

First, let me say plainly: we see the CBN and other regulators as partners. OPay contributed to the working groups behind the Payments System Vision 2028, and we prefer to engage early rather than react to circulars after they land. On the technology side, we planned for regulatory change from the start. All our compliance logic, KYC tiers, transaction limits, screening, and reporting sit in configurable services rather than being hard-coded all over the platform. So when a directive changes something, we adjust it centrally, test it, and roll it out without shaking the customer experience. Where it really shows is in execution. Take an identity verification upgrade; that can feel like a wall to a customer, or a doorway, depending on how you build it. We work hard on the doorway version: clear guidance in the app, plain language, and our agents helping customers who are less comfortable with technology. When compliance is done well, customers actually trust you more, because they see the same rules that protect the system protecting them.

Many customers interact with OPay daily without fully appreciating the complexity behind the platform. Can you walk us through what happens behind the scenes when a customer initiates a transfer or payment?

I enjoy this question because the best engineering in payments is the engineering nobody sees. When you tap “Send,” a few things happen very quickly. First, we confirm it’s really you, your credentials, your device, and increasingly the way you behave on your phone. At the same time, our fraud systems are scoring the transaction against hundreds of signals. Then, before anything moves, we deliberately pause you at a pre-confirmation step: we resolve and display the recipient’s name and the exact amount, and ask you to look at both: is this the person you intended, is this the figure you meant? You can go back and re-check before you commit. People sometimes see that screen as a small formality, but it prevents an enormous amount of wrong transfers and fraud every single day. Then the money moves. If the person is on OPay, we settle it internally almost instantly. If they bank elsewhere, it routes through NIBSS Instant Payments, and our systems track it end to end, handling any timeouts or reversals automatically, until your notification arrives. All of that happens in the time it takes to blink twice, and it has to happen correctly millions of times a day. You see one word: “Successful.” Behind that word are thousands of engineering decisions.

Data has become one of the most valuable assets in financial services. How does OPay manage, secure, and responsibly utilise customer data to improve products while maintaining privacy and regulatory compliance?

My philosophy on this is simple: the customer’s data belongs to the customer. We’re custodians, nothing more. We operate under the Nigeria Data Protection Act and CBN requirements, with a dedicated data protection function, access on a strict need-to-know basis with everything logged and audited, encryption everywhere, and tokenisation so sensitive identifiers don’t spread across systems. Now, used responsibly, data genuinely serves customers. It powers our fraud protection. And it does something remarkable for inclusion: a customer’s transaction history becomes, in effect, a financial passport. Someone with no payslip and no collateral can access credit because their own behaviour vouches for them. Traditional lending could never do that. But we hold a hard line. We use data to serve customers, never to exploit them. In this business, privacy isn’t a compliance checkbox. It’s trust, and trust is the entire business.

Cloud computing, automation, and AI are reshaping financial services globally. Which of these technologies has had the biggest impact on OPay’s operations, and why?

If you force me to pick one, I’ll say AI, but let me be fair to the others, because AI only works standing on their shoulders. Elastic cloud-era infrastructure is what lets our capacity grow with demand, and automation is what allows a platform serving tens of millions of people to be run safely by a focused engineering team rather than an army. What makes AI different is that it changed what the platform can do, not just how cheaply it runs. In fraud, we moved from reacting to patterns to anticipating them. In customer service, routine issues get resolved in seconds, in the customer’s own language. I spoke about this at DigitalPay Expo this year, and my conviction keeps deepening: in a market like ours, AI is not a luxury on top of finance. It’s the thing that makes inclusive finance economically possible at all.

As transaction volumes continue to increase, what investments is OPay making in infrastructure to ensure the platform remains fast, secure, and resilient over the long term?

Our planning assumption is blunt: today’s peak is tomorrow’s baseline. So we build for the volumes we expect years ahead, not for last quarter. The money goes into four areas. Capacity, Resilience, Security and Observability. Capacity: we load-test the platform against multiples of our current peaks, so bottlenecks are removed before customers ever feel them. Resilience: deeper redundancy, faster failover, because resilience is something you buy in advance; you can’t buy it during an incident.  Security, where frankly the budget only moves in one direction. And observability, the monitoring and diagnostics, because you can’t guarantee what you can’t see. There’s a fifth one people rarely talk about: engineering quality itself. Paying down technical debt, refactoring old components, strengthening foundations. Nobody writes a press release about that work, but it decides whether the platform is still fast and stable in five years. My rule is simple: customers should never experience our growth as their inconvenience.

Beyond technology itself, talent is critical to innovation. How is OPay attracting, developing, and retaining the engineering and cybersecurity expertise needed to stay ahead in a competitive fintech landscape?

We employ both local and global talent to build and maintain our technology, and yes, we compete for that talent with the rest of Nigerian fintech and, frankly, with the rest of the world, because the best engineers can work for anyone from anywhere now. But I think our mission helps us win in this regard. Nothing beats the feeling of contributing to something that changes the lives of everyday people, and here, you can see it. An engineer ships a feature and watches it change how millions of Nigerians handle money, often including their own parents and siblings. You cannot buy that feeling. And the work itself keeps the best people engaged: genuinely hard problems, real scale, real-time systems, real adversaries. Talented engineers want to be where the hardest, most meaningful problems are. That’s here.

Financial inclusion remains a major priority in Nigeria. How has technology enabled OPay to reach underserved communities and customers who previously had limited access to formal financial services?

Financial inclusion became necessary in Nigeria because of a scale problem, not a demand problem. People were saving. Some had access to traditional credit. But not at a scale that could cause real transformation in their lives or in the quality of their businesses. That was the real challenge. What OPay did was combine technology with presence. Smartphone telephony and rising internet penetration on one side, and on the other, our agent network, our boots on the ground: hundreds of thousands of agents across all 36 states, giving customers a trusted human face and turning cash into digital value right in their own neighbourhoods. Together, that combination delivers services that are fast, reliable and easily accessible to people who were previously excluded.  And the impact is where it matters most. We are changing lives in the hinterland, at the deepest places in the market, uplifting small businesses, turning things around for the everyday man. That, for me, is the heart of the OPay story.

Interoperability is becoming increasingly important across Nigeria’s payment ecosystem. How does OPay collaborate with banks, payment switches, regulators, and other fintech players to create a more connected financial ecosystem?

Interoperability is becoming really important across the ecosystem, and I want to give credit where it’s due: the Central Bank, in its wisdom, enforced interoperability precisely to address exclusion in Nigeria. That enforcement is what allowed fintechs to play.  And fintechs are simply better suited to reach the base of the pyramid, the places bank branches could never economically go. So that guideline has genuinely moved Nigeria forward, in the right direction. Our part in it is practical. We’re deeply integrated with NIBSS for instant payments; we support NQR, the national interoperable QR standard, one code accepting payment from any wallet or bank, and with the banks we’re partners far more than competitors: settlement relationships, card partnerships, shared fraud intelligence. With the CBN itself, our engagement is structural; we sat in the working groups behind Payments System Vision 2028. Going forward, interoperability won’t stop at Nigeria’s borders. With AfCFTA opening the continent’s markets and PAPSS building the settlement rails, we’re heading toward a continent where value moves across borders as easily as across the street. That will drive a turnaround not just for Nigeria but for the economies of many other African nations, and as Africa’s largest payments market, Nigeria should be leading it. OPay intends to be right at the front.

Looking ahead, what emerging technologies, such as generative AI, blockchain, biometric authentication, or quantum-resistant security, do you believe will have the greatest impact on digital banking in Nigeria over the next five years, and how is OPay preparing for them?

AI, blockchain, biometrics- these are all going to play a great role, and the honest answer is that for us at OPay, some of this is not “emerging” at all; it’s already in production. We use AI today in several ways: facial recognition, combating fraud in real time, and credit assessment. Biometrics is already central to how we authenticate: facial verification sits inside our security features like Location Guard and Night Guard, and as biometrics tie more deeply into national identity infrastructure like NIN and BVN, authentication will become stronger and simpler at the same time, which is the holy grail, because PINs and passwords remain the weakest link in the chain. Looking further out, generative AI will have the widest impact: conversational finance, in ordinary language, including Nigerian languages, handling support, disputes and guidance. In a market where literacy and language are real barriers, that’s an inclusion technology, not a toy.  On blockchain, the substance is cross-border settlement; stablecoin rails could cut the cost of remittances into Africa dramatically, and we study that space seriously, within regulatory guardrails. And quantum-resistant security sounds far off, but data stolen today can be decrypted tomorrow, so it’s already on our roadmap. So yes, these technologies will shape how things will be, and OPay is preparing for them deliberately: pilot early, scale what serves customers, never deploy technology for its own sake.

Finally, as Chief Operating Officer/Chief Technology Officer, what is your long-term vision for OPay’s technology strategy, and how do you see innovation shaping the future of digital banking and financial inclusion in Nigeria?

Let me answer with our mission, because it truly is the strategy: OPay exists to make financial services more inclusive through technology. Everything we build is in service of that. And we’ve set ourselves a bold target: one billion users by 2031. People sometimes hear that number and think it’s about scale for its own sake. It isn’t. It’s about what the number represents: we want to eliminate financial exclusion. Not reduce it. Eliminate it. And it starts here, in Nigeria. The path there has three parts. We deepen the core, keep raising the bar on reliability, speed and security, because scale amplifies whatever you are: excellence or failure. We broaden our offerings, from payments into a full financial life: savings and more. And possibly, we extend beyond our borders, because the exclusion problem we’re solving is not uniquely Nigerian; it is African. The future of digital banking here will be intelligent, invisible and inclusive, and the inclusive part is non-negotiable for me.  The real measure of this ecosystem is not the sophistication we build for people who were already banked. It’s the dignity and opportunity we extend to the last excluded Nigerian. Because technology, at its best, is not about machines. It’s about people, and building systems worthy of their trust.