Please introduce yourself and tell us about your role as Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Risevest? What does your day-to-day look like?
I’m Tony Odiba, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Risevest, a pan-African wealth management platform. The broader Rise Group also operates Hisa, our self-directed trading platform, and AssetBase, an exchange for alternative assets.
My background is unusual for fintech.
I started as a research and development engineer before moving into startup advisory and eventually co-founding Rise. The discipline transferred directly: in aerospace, failure is expensive; in fintech, failure erodes trust. Both demand systems thinking and rigorous testing.
Day-to-day, I’m split across three things: product strategy across our subsidiaries; partnerships and regulatory work, particularly as we move deeper into tokenised securities and capital markets infrastructure; and retention. I also lead the data team, so a decent portion of my time is spent obsessing over the numbers to make sure the user experience across our products isn’t broken.
What are the biggest product or strategy decisions that have made growth at Risevest possible?
A few come to mind, but three decisions stand out, and they all involved resisting obvious moves.
First, we didn’t treate access to stable-currency investments as a tack-on to something else, it was the product. We made it the centre of the proposition because that’s the actual job our users hire us for.
Second, we built for trust before we built for speed. We were operating in a low-trust society, in a category that was nascent but growing, so we optimised for high-trust acquisition channels in-app while doing things that don’t scale off-app like monthly meetup sessions with our early users to teach personal finance. That engendered real trust and built a community of ambassadors because we were giving more value than we were extracting. It’s the blueprint most consumer apps now adopt.
Third, our contrarian wedge at launch was a managed portfolio. Investing was a new behaviour for most of our users. At the time, retail participation in Nigerian capital markets was abysmal compared to developed markets and we didn’t want users carrying cognitive burden while adopting it. The managed-portfolio choice removed friction, differentiated us, and gave us the foundation to eventually add self-directed trading to the suite.
You’ve worked across B2B SaaS and fintech. What drew you specifically to wealth management, and how is the space evolving right now?
What drew me was the unfairness of access. If you grew up in Lagos and wanted exposure to global markets, the friction was absurd: currency controls, minimum balances, intermediaries taking a cut at every step, and regulatory complexity that meant most people simply opted out. It was an infrastructure problem, and structural unfairness compounds across generations of wealth. My dad’s generation lived through it. I didn’t want mine, or the next to.
The space is evolving in two directions at once. AI is collapsing the cost of advice: research and portfolio construction that used to require human advisors at premium fees are becoming software primitives. And tokenisation is starting to dissolve the geographic boundaries that kept African capital out of premium asset classes. The demand side and the supply side are both being rebuilt simultaneously. That’s rare in financial services.
For Africa specifically, the fintech sector has centred largely on payments. Payments solved the moving-money problem, but inclusion in payments is not the same as inclusion in investment. Wealth-building requires owning assets and that’s the phase we’re building for next.
You’ve led acquisitions and integrations of competing startups. What have you learned about building versus buying in fintech?
The Chaka and Hisa acquisitions were the most instructive. My framework is build when the moat is product depth; buy when it’s regulatory or distribution.
Build when your differentiator is engineering; when getting it 10% better than the competition meaningfully compounds the user experience. Buy when the moat exists outside your code, in licenses, customer relationships, and regulatory footprints. Those assets take years to secure organically.
The harder lesson is that integration assessment must begin during due diligence, not on day one. Day-zero assessment before inking the deal is how you avoid a massive headache. There’s a popular startup mantra that it’s always day one, and for product, that’s right, for acquisitions, it’s the opposite. By the time you’ve reached day one, it’s too late to discover that data models are incompatible or that regulatory postures and cultures clash. These don’t reconcile cleanly, and forcing speed into an unmapped integration is the fastest way to break what you bought.
AI is becoming central to financial services. How are AI-powered investment research assistants changing the way people interact with wealth platforms?
AI is doing two things to wealth platforms, and they’re being conflated.
The first is genuinely transformative: personalised research at scale. The job of a research assistant has historically been to translate market complexity into something a non-professional investor can act on, exactly the kind of work language models are good at, provided the underlying data layer is governed, accurate, and current. Done well, this collapses the gap between retail and institutional access.
The second is mostly noise: chatbots bolted onto investing apps. Most of what’s marketed as “AI-powered” is a thin LLM wrapper over generic content, and users figure that out within a few interactions. In my view, the platforms that get this right are the ones that built proprietary, structured financial data first and then layered AI on top. Anything else comes off as gimmicky, or a forced feature that doesn’t deliver personalised, real value.
You’ve also worked on integrating multi-market trading across African and European markets. What are the biggest opportunities (and challenges) in building cross-border fintech products?
For us, connecting African retail users to global assets is central to our mission, and the opportunity is genuinely large. Cross-border fintech is one of the few categories where the structural inefficiencies are big enough to support multiple winners. FX friction, settlement delays, and fragmented compliance regimes all create real cost wedges, and any platform that successfully compresses them captures real economic value.
But large opportunities come with understated challenges. The first is that “cross-border” is actually three separate problems: regulatory, operational, and behavioural. They don’t always solve at the same pace. You can have the licenses and still not have the rails; you can have the rails and still not have the user trust. The second is that compliance overhead doesn’t scale linearly with revenue; it scales with regulatory surface area. Adding a new market is rarely twice the work of one. It’s usually about four times, or at least it feels like it.
Engineering the reality where geography doesn’t determine wealth-building is tough work, and it relies heavily on building reliable infrastructure.
As a judge for Fintech50 2026, what stood out to you about this year’s entries? Were there any clear themes or trends emerging?
Two clear themes. The first is that the centre of gravity has shifted from consumer apps to infrastructure. The strongest entrants were the ones building the rails everyone else runs on. Defensible positions belong to the companies that banks, regulators, and other fintechs genuinely depend on. The strongest products clustered around cross-border banking middleware, regulatory standards, tokenisation infrastructure, and fraud operations layers.
The second theme is that AI is now table stakes rather than differentiation. Most entries claimed AI somewhere; only a handful used it as actual structural advantage. Companies like Datarails and Cleafy stood out because they treated AI as architectural, not decorative.
I did notice that few entries had distinctive emerging-market exposure. Bir ecosystem in the Caucasus and Platcorp Group across Africa showed what fintech consolidation looks like in under-penetrated markets, but it’s a thin layer of the pool. I think the next decade of fintech opportunity actually lives there.
Looking ahead, what excites you most about fintech in 2026?
Three things, in no particular order.
First, tokenisation is finally crossing the credibility threshold. We’ve spent a decade with the technology working but the regulatory wrapper shaky, and that’s now changing. The Ctrl Alt example in the FinTech50 pool, with $1.4B+ in tokenised assets and live FCA, VARA, and Bank of England Sandbox positioning, is exactly what was missing. Value follows the path of least friction, and when the rails are real, the asset classes follow.
Second, the maturation of AI as financial infrastructure. The companies building governed data layers, agentic workflows, and AI-native compliance will quietly become the picks and shovels of the next decade.
Third, and this is the one closest to my work, the unbundling of capital markets access for emerging markets. African retail investors shouldn’t have to choose between local instruments with limited upside and global instruments behind ten layers of friction. The infrastructure to fix that is finally being built, and the firms that build it correctly will define what wealth management looks like for the next generation.
What, if anything, makes you nervous about where the fintech industry is heading?
Every cycle, there’s a tendency to rediscover the same lesson and forgets it again: distribution and unit economics matter more than product polish. When capital is cheap, founders chase growth at any cost; when it tightens, they realise they never built a sustainable business. We’re at the tail end of one of those corrections now, and there’s a real risk we loop right back into the same pattern with AI as the new growth-at-all-costs narrative.
The second worry is concentration risk in regulatory infrastructure. Fintechs are increasingly dependent on a small number of banking partners, payment networks, and regulatory regimes. When one of those nodes wobbles, it cascades through everyone built on top.
Finally, what advice would you give to fintech founders trying to stand out in an increasingly crowded and competitive space?
First, pick a problem so specific that incumbents can’t comfortably copy you. Most failed fintechs tried to be 10% better than an incumbent at the same job; the ones that work are 10x better at a job the incumbent doesn’t take seriously. Specificity is the moat.
Second, treat regulatory positioning as product strategy. The companies in the FinTech50 pool that impressed me most built regulatory depth as a competitive advantage. Founders who treat licenses and sandbox participation as a cost line are leaving the most defensible part of the moat on the table.
Third, distribution beats product more often than founders want to admit. YouLend embedded inside Amazon and Shopify; Meshed selling through accountants. If you can find a structural distribution channel competitors can’t replicate, you can ship a worse product and still win. That might not be satisfying to hear as a builder, but it’s true.
