The company needed to pay a bill in Kenya, but the funds were held in Nigeria. Somewhere between San Francisco, Lagos, and Nairobi, the system fell apart.
So Ojo improvised. “I bought Bitcoin with Naira on Bitpesa, swapped it into shillings, and paid the bill through M-Pesa,” he said. “The whole thing took about an hour, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it afterwards.”
It took about an hour, and it worked, but what stayed with him wasn’t the speed or the novelty, it was the fact that this kind of improvisation was even necessary.
That moment would sit quietly in the background as Ojo moved through fintech, venture building, and investing. But it never left him. It eventually became the foundation for Yousend, the remittance company he co-founded to simplify how Africans in the diaspora send money home.
Building on lessons from fintech
Long before launching the company, he had built startups, worked across fintech infrastructure, and spent years observing how money moved—or failed to move—across borders. Those experiences taught him lessons that now define Yousend’s approach.
The first was that trust matters more than features. Building SureGifts exposed him to a reality many founders discover the hard way. Customers do not necessarily choose the most sophisticated product. They choose the one they trust with their money. “The winner is usually the company people aren’t afraid to hand money to,” Ojo said.
The second lesson came through Busha, the cryptocurrency platform where he witnessed digital asset infrastructure evolve from a niche experiment into technology capable of supporting real-world financial services.
More importantly, he learned the value of regulation. Many fintech companies treat compliance as an obstacle to growth. Ojo sees it differently. “Regulation is a moat, not a tax,” he stated.
That philosophy has become central to Yousend’s strategy. Today, the company operates with regulatory approvals across key markets, including an FCA authorisation in the UK, FINTRAC registration in Canada, and a Central Bank of Nigeria International Money Transfer Operator licence, which together underpin its cross-border operations. Rather than entering markets first and addressing compliance later, Yousend secured its regulatory foundations before launching publicly.
For Ojo, this approach is not about satisfying regulators. It is about earning trust in an industry where trust determines survival. That matters even more in one of fintech’s most competitive spaces.
Why a crowded market still isn’t solved
The global remittance market is crowded with established players, digital challengers, and regional specialists all fighting for the same customers. Yet Ojo argues that competition should not be mistaken for progress.
“People often say remittance is saturated,” he said. “But crowded isn’t the same as solved.”
His reasoning is straightforward. Consumers continue to switch providers whenever they find something faster, cheaper, or more reliable. Loyalty in financial services is often weaker than many companies assume.
The challenge, he believes, is not competing with incumbents. It is building something meaningfully different. For Yousend, that differentiation begins beneath the surface. The company uses stablecoin infrastructure to settle transactions across currencies without relying on the traditional correspondent banking systems that have historically made international transfers expensive and slow.
“Stablecoins let us route value across currencies almost instantly, around the clock, without the capital being trapped. Cheaper for us, faster for the customer.”
While the technology sounds complex, Ojo insists customers should never have to think about it. “The stablecoin is just the plumbing,” he explained. “Nobody admires the pipes; they just want the water to run.”
Yousend operates on a system that allows it to offer significantly lower foreign exchange spreads while settling most transactions in minutes rather than days. Importantly, users never interact with cryptocurrency directly.
This distinction matters because public scepticism around anything associated with cryptocurrency remains high. Rather than trying to educate customers about blockchain technology, Ojo believes the better strategy is simplicity.
“We don’t ask anyone to care about crypto at all,” he said. “You put in Pounds, your mum gets Naira. That’s the whole experience.”
A $1 million test before launch
Before officially launching to the public, Yousend processed more than $1 million in transactions through a closed beta programme. The company intentionally avoided mass marketing during this period.
Instead, access was referral-only, meaning every new user arrived through someone who had already used and trusted the platform.
For Ojo, that growth was significant because referrals reveal something advertisements cannot.
“In communities like ours, trust travels person to person,” he said.
The beta also demonstrated that speed and reliability remain powerful acquisition tools. Approximately 95% of transfers settled in under two minutes, creating an experience users were willing to recommend to family and friends.
Building more than a money transfer app
The company is already active in Canada and the United Kingdom, where it formally launched in June, tapping into a corridor that remains one of the most active in global remittances. The UK international remittance market reached $11.46 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow at 2.2% annually through 2028, with UK-to-Africa flows playing a significant role in that volume.
Nigeria alone received $19.8 billion in remittances in 2024, accounting for 35% of Sub-Saharan Africa’s total inflows, showing the scale of demand across its core markets. Against that backdrop, Yousend currently facilitates transfers into Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and Tanzania, while expansion into the United States and additional European markets is already underway.
Yet Ojo’s long-term ambition extends beyond transaction volume. He wants to build something rare in financial services: a remittance brand that people identify with emotionally. He points to Cash App as an example of a financial product that evolved into a cultural brand.
Most money transfer companies, he argues, remain utilities. People use them, but rarely feel connected to them.
Yousend want to change that. Internally, the company refers to its growing community as “Yousenders”, customers who not only use the platform but actively recommend it to others. Building that kind of advocacy takes time.
Features can be copied. Pricing can be matched. Technology advantages eventually narrow. But trust, reputation, and community are far harder to replicate.
