After graduating in March 2020 from Obafemi Awolowo University in Osun State, southwestern Nigeria, with a Botany degree, Elizabeth Ajao appeared set for a career in finance. She had spent years planning to pivot from discipline, only for the global COVID-19 pandemic to rewrite her plans.
“I knew I wasn’t going to do anything with Botany, so I had been preparing myself since 300 level for a finance career after school was done,” Ajao says. “I had secured an internship in the corporate finance division of Sterling Bank before leaving school. But the pandemic happened, lockdown started, and I couldn’t resume the role.”
Ajao looked for alternatives for weeks. She landed a product operations internship at SmartTeller, a digital banking platform-as-a-service company.
“That was my first entry into tech, even though I didn’t realise it then,” she recalls.
The journalism interlude
After six months at SmartTeller, Ajao transitioned to tech journalism.
“At the time, I just wanted to make money because I was out of a job. And I found the writing-related role at Weetracker,” she recalls.
The income helped, but writing wasn’t an unfamiliar territory; Ajao had always enjoyed it.
In 2019, while in her third year at the university, she had written for the Botany department’s publication, the Department of Botany Board. Before the end of her fourth year, she had started editing for the publication.
Joining WeeTracker, a Pan-African research and media company, during the height of the pandemic in October 2020, she began documenting the African tech ecosystem she intended to build within.
“I was focused on covering emerging stories in African tech. It was short-lived (three months), but I told a lot of stories, about 30 at the time,” Ajao says.
At WeeTracker, she wrote about startups, innovation, and the economy in Africa, notably venture funding in Francophone Africa, Kenya’s SportPesa, and the end of cheque usage in South Africa.
She credits that period with shaping her understanding of the broader African startup ecosystem.
“[Tech journalism] exposed me more to the tech industry. You get to know more companies, more startups, by default,” Ajao says.
Eventually, writing about the industry wasn’t enough; she wanted to be inside it.
However, the path forward wasn’t immediately clear. “I actually considered product management, but I wasn’t sure how to get in,” she recalls.
Ajao eventually got a product management internship in 2021 at VFD Microfinance Bank Limited (VBank), a Lagos-based financial services institution, doing product operations. It was a period she remembers for the intensity of the work.
“I took the internship because I wanted to get exposure, experience, and I wanted to also prove myself,” she recalls.
In late 2021, she left VBank for Enyata, a software development agency that builds digital products for partners across multiple industries, where she spent over two years as a project manager. She worked with clients including Mdaas Global, an African health-tech company, and Prestmit, a digital asset marketplace, helping them move “their ideas into workable solutions.”
It was at Enyata that she realised her niche was not just tech, but specifically finance.
“I realised that when I was building FinTech products, there was this level of joy that came [with building them]. So when I wanted to niche, it was a no-brainer for me to go to a FinTech company. It just came naturally to me,” Ajao recalls.
Builders in Fintech
The natural affinity for financial systems led Ajao back to the banking sector, but she job-hunted for seven months: “I had a really hard time going back fully into fintech after my internship and role at Enyata. An easy way in for me was working in a bank.”
In 2023, she secured a role in 2023 as Product Manager, Payments, in the tech team at Polaris Bank, a Nigerian commercial bank.
“I oversaw payments for the VULTe 3.0 app, the digital banking arm of Polaris Bank. My role involved making payments on the app reliable,” Ajao says.
During her first nine months on the job, she discovered a void in the market: there was no central repository for the localised knowledge required to build financial products in Africa.
“For fintech, especially when you’re building within the African context, the knowledge you need to build is actually not very out there,” Ajao says, “I found myself struggling a lot in the early stages. Everybody was just winging it. You can go on ChatGPT and Google, but you don’t get as much localised knowledge as you would right from talking to someone who is actually building.”
That struggle led to the birth of Builders in Fintech, a community-driven platform co-founded with her colleague, Betty Bada. Launched in June 2025, the platform serves as an open-source hub for those navigating the complexities of the industry.
Ajao says Builders in Fintech has a community of roughly 3,000 fintech professionals across social media and the website, with a readership of over 10,000 since inception. The platform has a fintech glossary feature that explains technical terms and processes in the fintech industry.
Builders in Fintech is designed to be participatory. Ajao says that she and her co-founder do not have all the answers. The website allows users to submit terms or resources, which are then reviewed by a back-end team before going live.
“We want the website to be a place where, if you’re building in the fintech industry in Africa and you go to the website, you find something,” she says.
The project is currently supported by a volunteer core team of six, including designers and legal experts. While currently operating as a non-profit, Ajao has a clear eye on sustainability. Plans for a monthly newsletter, sponsorships, and spotlighting niche fintech companies are in the works to keep the operations afloat.
“In the next three to five years, I want it to be the go-to platform whenever people need clarity about fintech,” Ajao says.
While the current focus is heavily Nigerian, she plans to scale the initiative’s impact across the broader African continent.
‘Uniquely human’
Ajao is not anxious about artificial intelligence (AI), but she is clear-eyed about what it means for her profession.
The product manager’s value has rested on the heavy lifting of documentation: writing the Product Requirements Document (PRD), a foundational document defining the purpose, features, functionality, and behaviour of a product. A product manager also documents user stories and exhaustive roadmap documentation, a visual summary that maps out the vision and direction of a product offering.
But as generative AI begins to automate these functional tasks, the product management market is seeing a brutal shift where the barrier to entry for building has dropped sharply as a result. For operators like Ajao, the question is no longer how to build, but how their role remains relevant in the AI age.
“When I first started in product, I could spend weeks writing documentation or structuring product requirements. Today, with AI tools, a large part of that process can be accelerated dramatically,” she says.
To stay ahead of this curve, Ajao is doubling down on problem framing and strategic execution. AI tools allow her to focus on the grit required to move a product from a concept to a functional reality.
“The [AI] tools may change how quickly we work, but they don’t replace judgment, context, or the ability to make the right decisions about what should be built and why.”
For Ajao, the future of tech isn’t about competing with machines, but about leaning into what she calls the “uniquely human” parts of the job: thinking clearly, problem framing, and execution.
“Execution has always been my strongest muscle. I believe staying excellent at that will keep me relevant for many years to come,” she says.
Outside of work, Ajao is pursuing a master’s degree in Innovation and Information Technology Management at the University of Salford in the United Kingdom, while serving as the Product Manager, Payments, at Quidax, a Nigerian cryptocurrency startup.
When she needs to switch off, the options are reliable: a “cringey” Nollywood movie or a K-drama.
“They are so relaxing for me,” she says. “Alternatively, any activity that involves being with my friends—I’m in. I just love their company.”
