👨🏿‍🚀TechCabal Daily – A Wise move to Nigeria

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Ibukun Adedeji is a technologist and product leader working on large-scale financial and operational systems across Africa. He is currently a Product Manager at Moniepoint, where he contributes to products that power millions of businesses through payments and financial infrastructure.

Over the past several years, Ibukun has worked across lending, payments, commerce, and investments business areas, building and scaling digital products in complex, high-volume environments. Before Moniepoint, he held product leadership roles at companies including Flutterwave, Sabi, and Lupiya in Zambia, where he worked on credit, payments, and investment products serving emerging markets. 

• Explain what you do to a 5-year-old.
  

Imagine you have a piggy bank where you keep your money. Now, imagine there’s a magical piggy bank on your parents’ phone that can do really cool things like send money to grandma, pay for your snacks at the store, or even help your parents save money for your birthday party. 

My job is to think about what would make that magical piggy bank work really well for other adults. I talk to lots of people to understand what they need, then I work with the people who build the magical piggy bank to make sure it’s easy to use and helps everyone with their money. I make sure the magical piggy bank is safe, easy to understand, and does exactly what people need it to do.

• What’s one rookie mistake you made while working in product, and what did that teach you?

In hindsight, I focused a lot on my output as a product manager rather than pursuing business outcomes. The lesson there is for product managers to reduce their involvement in activities that drain energy without pushing the needle or making an impact on the metrics that really matter. As a product person, the priority should be to shape business outcomes while giving your customers a super experience.

• What’s one thing about user behaviour in emerging markets that still surprises you?

Resilience and creativity in how people adapt technology to their realities. When you design a product, you imagine a fairly clean flow of how it should be used. But users in emerging markets often bend the system in ways you never anticipated because they are solving real problems in their day-to-day lives.

For instance, a payment product might be designed for simple transfers, but merchants start using it as an informal accounting system. Or people begin routing money through multiple wallets just to manage liquidity across different networks. What you thought was a feature becomes infrastructure for behaviours you didn’t originally plan for.

While the timeline of its entry into the country is still unknown, Wise, a UK remittance fintech company, has received regulatory approval to launch its services in Nigeria. The announcement came tucked inside a UK government communiqué following the UK–Nigeria Enhanced Trade and Investment Partnership dialogue on March 16.

This was a long time coming: Nigerians have been interacting with Wise through cross-border corridors, albeit indirectly. Diaspora users could send money into Nigeria through Wise-linked accounts or third-party integrations, while freelancers and remote workers have also used Wise to receive payments in foreign accounts. The fintech just didn’t have a full local presence, but this regulatory approval changes that.

The crowded airspace: Wise will be stepping into Nigeria’s crowded remittance market with local fintechs and other foreign players, such as NALA, that are fighting for cross-border cash flow. On one end, there are Western Union and MoneyGram, and on the other are fintech challengers like Flutterwave and LemFi. Yes, Wise has been operating in the market underground, but it will need a more competitive edge.

Why this entry matters: Wise has been circling Africa. In December 2025, it received conditional approval from the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) to operate as a Category 2 Authorised Dealer in Foreign Exchange with Limited Authority (ADLA). For years, companies like Wise served African users from the outside, supporting corridors without fully entering the ecosystem. Regulatory approvals show that these companies are ready for on-ground participation, which raises the stakes for local players and signals a growing market.

Luno, the Africa-focused crypto firm, has a new feature for users addicted to shiny tech.

Its new prediction markets feature is trying to turn every crypto watcher into a paid forecaster. With as little as $5, for example, a user in South Africa or Nigeria can take a view on whether Bitcoin, Ether, Solana, Dogecoin, or XRP will end the day above or below a certain price, and, if they are right, walk away with a quick $2 or more in a few hours, depending on the odds and their stake. 

The product sits between trading and entertainment: You do not need to own the coin or understand leverage, you just fund a separate USDC wallet, pick a side, and let the clock run.

Who is this really for? Beyond futures traders and degens already used to complex crypto products, the army of unsolicited “analysts” in WhatsApp groups who call tops and bottoms every day for free will find this useful. 

If you are convinced that something US President Trump said will nudge Bitcoin price up or down, Luno is asking why you are not putting your money where your mouth is. Prediction markets carry trading risk, but what is a little risk to experience maximum upside? Luno wants you to think exactly that and lean into the feature.

Is this gambling? It depends on who you ask. There is a genuine morality question here. The product has a clear risk‑reward structure and looks a lot like gaming, but under the hood, prediction markets are built as a set of short‑term financial contracts, made up of many small positions that collectively form a kind of crowd intelligence on where prices might land.

Operators will insist it is not gambling because there is so much maths, pricing, and probability engineering involved. Regulators, who tend to judge technology by how people use it rather than its self-description, may see things differently. For them, the question will be whether this helps retail users express informed views or simply gives them a sleeker way to lose money faster. 

More importantly, the protection guardrails will matter to regulators when evaluating prediction markets in the future. At the rate of its hype, that future is not very far.

Jacaranda Health, a Kenyan healthtech startup, secured $600 thousand in funding from Swedfund. (Mar 17)

Here are the other deals for the week:

• Bumpa, a Nigerian e-commerce startup, raised an undisclosed amount in funding from Jobtech Allice. (Mar 18)
• Flowcart, a Kenyan e-commerce startup, raised an undisclosed amount in funding from Jobtech Alliance. (Mar 18)

Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn for more funding announcements. Before you go, what does it mean to be an AI startup in Africa?. Find out more here.

Written by: Opeyemi Kareem, Emmanuel Nwosu, and Success Sotonwa

Edited by: Emmanuel Nwosu & Ganiu Oloruntade