Digital Nomads: Kennedy Adetayo traded an MBA for a life of global expansions and Maltese sunsets

“I was in Lagos, but barely in Lagos. I was almost abroad every other time,” Kennedy Adetayo recalled of his role as Regional Marketing Manager at Exness, a global fintech company and multi-asset broker. 

But it did not start this way. When Adetayo pivoted from his academic background in agribusiness, he was driven by a hunger for the world mentioned in the case studies on Apple and Google from his Master’s in Business Administration (MBA) classes. 

“I wanted something different,” he said. 

And he went for it: a career rich in marketing, branding, and artificial intelligence (AI) for global companies, just like he had always wanted.

The MBA pivot in his early career days

After obtaining his MBA in Agricultural Business Operations from the Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta, in southwestern Nigeria, Adetayo realised he did not want to build a career around fast-moving consumer goods—or agri-only products. 

In his first role after completing his MBA in February 2015, he worked as a brand officer at Africa Prudential, a Nigerian-based share registration and dividend management provider, where he oversaw printed banners and ensured brand compliance. In that time, Adetayo realised he loved reading and writing and had an eye for mistakes in narratives. 

So, when an opportunity for a copywriting role at Aqua Agency, an integrated marketing agency, arose, Adetayo applied. 

“The difference was my interview process,” he recalled. “During my live walk-in interview, I sat down and created a full campaign from beginning to end. It wasn’t the answer they expected, and they just hired me on the spot.”

When he joined Aqua Agency in February 2016, Adetayo and other strategists handled briefs for companies such as MTN. It was here that the Head of Strategy and Digital Innovation, Adepoju “PJ” Bakare, offered guidance, and soon after Bakare’s conversation with management, Adetayo started working in strategy by June 2016.  

In 2018, a Dubai-based management consulting and marketing company, Livingstone-Templeton, was expanding into Nigeria, and Adetayo applied with the same playbook with which he secured his role at Aqua. 

“I gave them a 90-day plan for it as part of my interview process,” he admitted. “And they absolutely loved it and asked me to come execute it myself.” 

By June 2018, Adetayo was a Brand Manager at the multinational before joining TigerWit, a UK-headquartered global financial technology company, in February 2020. This was where things started to shift for Adetayo.

Deepening the African footprint

In 2018, two years before Adetayo joined, TigerWit launched a partnership with the football club Liverpool, a partnership that extended till 2021. TigerWit planned to expand into Africa by January 2020. The then Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Tim Hughes, had shared the company’s expansion plans. 

By February 2020, as the Marketing manager for the Nigerian and African region, Adetayo was tasked with establishing TigerWit’s presence in Nigeria and Africa. 

“Part of my role in TigerWit included relations with the foreign teams [in] London and Dubai,” he said. “They both had independent marketing teams, and I had to be in sync, so that our global brand could also be in sync, and there’s no off-brand messaging, even though most of my brand branding was localised, but it was also in regulation with the global brand guidelines.” 

Only four months after Adetayo had come onboard, he was promoted to Head of Marketing/Business Development, Africa. 

His role went beyond traditional marketing; he was responsible for establishing TigerWit’s brand in Nigeria, driving user acquisition and retention, and overseeing campaigns for everyday traders (B2C), payment partners and other intermediaries (B2B), and engagement with regulators and banks (B2G). 

“TigerWit was not that big before they came into Nigeria, and by moving to Nigeria, their numbers went exponential for multiple reasons. We are over 200 million in Nigeria,” he said.

Observing the impact of Adetayo’s work at TigerWit, Exness, a global fintech company and multi-asset broker, invited him to replicate the success: “They asked if I would be able to handle at least 30 African countries. I said, ‘I wouldn’t know till I try.’” 

The role was travel-heavy and initially focused on West African countries, then moved into East and Southern Africa. There was one major recurring constraint: visas. Within West Africa, Adetayo had fewer visa issues, but between East and Southern Africa, getting a visa became a major challenge.

Twice, Adetayo was rejected when he had applied for a  South African visa. In one of those rejections, Exness was opening a new office in South Africa, and he needed to be present as the regional marketing lead.  His visa difficulties were unusual enough that they exposed a new challenge for the company. 

So, Exness created a dedicated team to handle visa-related issues for cases like his. Eventually, he built relationships with two travel agents whom he used in rotation to secure his visas. 

At Exness, Adetayo found an unusually supportive environment: the company cared primarily about results, giving him wide autonomy to decide where he needed to be and how to execute. If he needed to fly to a market like Kenya the next day, the response was essentially to approve the budget and let him get on with it.

Discovering data and Malta

Adetayo began repositioning himself towards data analysis to strengthen his role at Exness. 

So, in early 2021, he enrolled at Isles of Content to learn marketing data analysis, then transitioned into a contract role with the school. There, he handled real user and product data for brands targeting Nigeria and Africa. 

“They’re [Isles of content] based in Nigeria, but their clients are in Malta, and are serving Nigerian markets,” Adetayo said.

The data work sharpened his decision-making at Exness but also opened his eyes to opportunities beyond pure regional marketing, making it easier to contemplate life after a role he felt was close to the peak of what he could do in African-focused marketing. 

“It was from them (Isles of content) that I first heard the word ‘Malta’,” Adetayo said. “So I did a little bit of research. While doing my research, I found out about the digital nomad in Malta, and from there, I applied for that.”

Navigating European constraints and crypto headwinds

Intrigued by Europe’s more specialised marketing landscape and the flexibility of remote work, after applying for Malta’s digital nomad visa, Adetayo relocated there in May 2023 and spent over two years on the island. 

From Malta, he continued consulting for the Isles of content and other European clients in marketing and data, while learning to present himself less as a full-stack marketer or a generalist in marketing and as a senior marketing data analyst. While in Malta, Adetayo expanded his network by joining a Nigerian community. 

“I didn’t realise we’re that much, but over time we grew up to over 100 in a group,” he said.

The digital nomad phase gave him international exposure and deeper data skills, but also exposed the limits of Malta’s salary bands and visa rules, especially with some contracts still paying in naira. While the visa allowed him to work from Malta, Adetayo could not work for Maltese entities.

After settling into Malta as a digital nomad, Adetayo took on a regional marketing contract with Binance-owned Trust Wallet in July 2024, with a brief to grow its footprint in Nigeria and then across Africa. 

Operating remotely but travelling back to Nigeria, he led a pilot event at the Federal University of Technology, Akure, testing a campus-tour model for crypto education and adoption. 

However, the escalating regulatory crackdown on crypto in Nigeria, including tensions between the government and Binance, made it increasingly risky to run high-profile, on‑ground activations. And this constrained Trust Wallet’s expansion strategy.

Eventually, Adetayo transitioned out of the role in December 2024 due to the uncertain crypto regulatory landscape. Leaning further into his interest in AI, he stepped into a senior AI data trainer role with  US-based Invisible Technologies in April 2024, where he helped stress‑test and refine large language models (LLMs) for safety, ethics and reliability.

Drawing on his experience in marketing and finance, Adetayo designed and evaluated prompts to probe AI model behaviour on sensitive areas such as weapons and explicit content, banking data, privacy and regulatory compliance across general-purpose AIs and sector-specific systems for firms like banks and enterprise platforms. 

As an advanced AI data trainer, his role sat at the infrastructure of AI, using his understanding of how people work and transact to help ensure these models behave responsibly in real‑world use.  

In September 2025, Adetayo moved back to Nigeria while working remotely with Invisible Technologies until December.

The life of a digital nomad is filled with transitions, and for Kennedy Adetayo, this looks like a career transition in the years to come. 

“I’m looking into less of a marketing role and more of a country manager role in my next few years, and I’m actively working towards that,” he said.

For a career that has entailed facilitating the expansion efforts of global companies into Nigeria and Africa, Adetayo sees a world where he continues to support these expansions. The global companies he had studied in his MBA classrooms had now spurred a different kind of hunger in him.

“I want to be the main factor, if not the pillar, responsible for them actually gaining ground in Nigeria and Africa,” he said. “I believe there are a lot of things working over in many of the countries I’ve travelled to that can be replicated successfully over here.”