Building Africa's Open Finance Infrastructure
As the first product hire and Product Lead at Okra, I built the company from the ground up into Africa's leading open finance platform—launching 100+ products, expanding across 3 countries, and helping raise $35M+ in venture funding.
Company Context
Okra is a fintech infrastructure company providing open banking APIs across Africa. When I joined as the first product hire in May 2020, the company had a vision but needed to transform that vision into a scalable product platform.
The Challenge
Building Category Leadership in an Emerging Market
Open banking was nascent in Africa when I joined. The challenge wasn't just building products—it was defining the category itself while navigating:
- •Regulatory uncertainty: No clear open banking frameworks existed in Nigeria, South Africa, or Kenya
- •Market education: Developers and businesses didn't understand the value of financial data APIs
- •Technical complexity: Each bank had different authentication systems, data formats, and reliability issues
- •Competitive pressure: Well-funded global players were eyeing the African market
The Product Question
How do we build a comprehensive open finance platform that serves multiple use cases (data access, identity verification, payments) across different markets with varying infrastructure maturity—while moving fast enough to establish category leadership before competitors enter the space?
Strategic Approach
1. Modular Product Architecture
Instead of building a monolithic platform, I designed a modular approach that allowed us to ship fast and adapt to market feedback:
2. Developer-First GTM Motion
I championed a developer-first approach to build market momentum:
3. Ruthless Prioritization Framework
With limited resources and 100+ potential features, I implemented a scoring system that balanced:
4. Strategic Market Expansion
Rather than trying to launch everywhere at once, I led a methodical expansion strategy:
Achieved product-market fit, built reference customers, refined APIs
Leveraged Nigeria learnings, adapted for more mature banking infrastructure
Mobile money integration focus, M-Pesa connectivity
Impact & Results
Product Portfolio Growth
Business Impact
Team & Process Evolution
Key Learnings
1. Category Creation Requires Market Education, Not Just Product Excellence
Building the best API wasn't enough. We had to invest heavily in developer education, content marketing, and community building to help the market understand why open finance mattered. The product teams that win in emerging markets are the ones that can articulate clear value propositions for new paradigms.
2. Modular Architecture Enables Speed Without Sacrificing Quality
By designing products as composable modules rather than monolithic features, we could ship new capabilities quickly while maintaining system reliability. This architectural approach also made it easier to expand into new markets—we could reuse core modules and swap out market-specific components.
3. Developer Experience is Product Strategy
In B2B fintech, your initial users are developers. Investing in exceptional DX—clear docs, helpful error messages, realistic sandbox data, responsive support—created bottom-up demand that made sales cycles dramatically shorter. Many enterprise deals started with a developer trying our API and becoming an internal champion.
4. Ruthless Prioritization Compounds Over Time
With 100+ products shipped, the accumulated impact of good prioritization decisions was massive. Every "no" to a feature request freed up resources for higher-impact work. Building transparent frameworks for prioritization also helped align stakeholders—sales and engineering understood why certain features weren't being built.
5. Geographic Expansion is a Product Challenge, Not Just a Go-to-Market One
Each new market required significant product adaptation—different banking protocols, regulatory requirements, payment rails, and user behaviors. The mistake would have been to view expansion purely as a sales/marketing problem. We succeeded by treating each country launch as a product initiative with dedicated research, localization, and iteration.
Want to Learn More?
Interested in discussing product strategy, fintech infrastructure, or my experience scaling products in emerging markets?