Inside the product mind of Ebube Ojimadu: a quiet force reshaping African fintech

Ebube Ojimadu does not fit the familiar stereotype of a tech product builder. She did not study computer science, nor did she begin her career in finance. Instead, she studied English and started her career in marketing communications.

Yet today, as the Head of Product at Quidax, she is the quiet force shaping how millions of people across Africa move, store, and relate to digital assets across borders and regulatory lines.

Leading a team of product managers, she oversees the strategy and delivery of a platform that serves customers in over 70 countries and has processed billions of dollars in transactions. I sat down with Ebube to discuss how her non-traditional background, focus on emotional clarity, and commitment to regulatory integrity are redefining one of Africa’s most trusted crypto exchanges.

The transition: From Literature in English to product leadership

Blessed Frank: Ebube, your route into product management was guided by people rather than protocols. Can you share how that transition happened?

Ebube Ojimadu: I’ve always been deeply curious and generally fascinated about people and products. What drew me to product management was a persistent curiosity about why users behaved the way they did and why businesses so often failed to meet them where they were. I eventually transitioned because I was extremely passionate about solving real problems for customers as well as growing the business. Product management offered that rare combination of solving real problems while still driving growth. For me, that blend was non-negotiable.

Blessed Frank: One of the most defining moments of your tenure was the rebuilding of the Quidax mobile app. You didn’t frame this as a redesign but as a “reset”. Why?

Ebube Ojimadu: The earlier version worked, but years of fast shipping and aggressive expansion had left behind a product that newcomers struggled with. Cognitive load was high, and support tickets were mounting. The challenge wasn’t visual polish; it was emotional clarity.

The initiative was to re-architect the core mobile experience to make Quidax feel calm, trustworthy, and obvious without reducing capability. We wanted it to feel safe without stripping away power. I strongly believe that a product does not earn trust by explaining itself well; it earns trust by requiring less explanation in the first place.

Blessed Frank: What were the concrete outcomes of that shift in thinking?

Ebube Ojimadu: The results were both user-facing and commercial:

Activation rates improved materially, especially among first-time crypto users. 

Day 7 and Day 30 retention rose due to smoother early experiences.

Support requests linked to confusion and “What happened to my money?” dropped sharply.

In terms of user feedback, people stopped describing Quidax as “complicated but powerful” and started describing it as “easy and powerful”.

Building for Africa’s financial reality

Blessed Frank: You’ve been vocal about how products often fail in Africa because they assume “perfect conditions”. How have you adapted Quidax to serve underbanked markets?

Ebube Ojimadu: Underbanked users are not unsophisticated; they are navigating systems that were not designed for their realities. We stopped treating market differences as a localisation problem and started seeing them as a question of access and confidence. Our strategy shifted to “graded access”:

First, we had to create multiple funding paths. Essentially, we provided various ways to move money in and out based on local availability.

We also had to gamify compliance. Instead of locking out users altogether, we created tiered limits. Limits that increase with verification depth so users can participate even if they aren’t “wholly banked”.

We also ensured we conveyed something called “Honesty as Design”. We established transparent trade-offs by clearly presenting them and explaining them upfront, instead of burying the constraint behind a “failed transaction” notification. We find that users will accept constraints if they understand them, but they won’t tolerate surprises.

Blessed Frank: Quidax recently became the first Nigerian exchange to secure a provisional licence from the SEC. Many see regulation as an obstacle, but you seem to view it differently.

Ebube Ojimadu: Contrary to popular narratives, I don’t see regulation as an obstacle. Uneven compliance is the real source of friction. We chose not to wait for the licence to start changing how we built. Well before the licence was secured, we assumed that informal processes would not scale and anything we couldn’t explain clearly to a regulator would eventually harm users.

We collapsed compliance into “product primitives” like identity, custody, and traceability. We even delayed or killed features that were growth-positive in the short term but fragile under regulatory scrutiny. In a regulated era, trust compounds, and compliance becomes a clear competitive advantage.

Blessed Frank: Beyond the software, you’ve been deliberate about building “product talent”. What do you look for when hiring?

Ebube Ojimadu: Headcount has never been my primary metric; judgment, ownership, and “product taste” are. I also often favour candidates from adjacent roles like marketing or customer success who have deep user empathy and understand African fintech realities.

We give PMs end-to-end ownership early, including the rewards and consequences of their decisions. They are expected to sit with user feedback too and explore multiple avenues to deeply understand the customer. Perhaps the most leveraged move was teaching “product thinking” to non-PMs, such as engineers and operations staff. That way, product thinking stopped being a bottleneck and became a shared discipline.

Blessed Frank: You engage frequently with the wider community through the Guardian Newspaper, The Nation Newspaper, and various conferences. Why is this external work so important?

Ebube Ojimadu: African fintech cannot mature if those closest to the work stay silent about its realities. Whether I’m speaking at the WeTech Conference or the Wine and Design Conference, my focus is on operating truth, the human cost of poor UX and the trade-offs between speed and regulation. It’s about ecosystem responsibility.

Blessed Frank: Looking ahead five years, what infrastructure change will most expand financial inclusion in Africa?

Ebube Ojimadu: I don’t believe inclusion will be driven by a single app. Instead, crypto will recede into the infrastructure. Programmable money will flow quietly through everyday systems. Stable, regulated on-chain settlement will power salaries and remittances without users needing to think about “crypto” at all. In that future, inclusion isn’t just about access. It is about expanding what money can actually do.

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