Abimbola Bajomo grew up around money.

Not the kind of children tucked into piggy banks, but the kind discussed over dinner tables by adults responsible for moving them.

Her mother worked in banking operations. Her uncle was a banker. So is her brother. Conversations about cheque clearing and customer complaints were normal in the house.

“From when I was a child, I have literally known nothing more than money,” Bajomo says. “I remember going to the bank and watching how they used to manage it. It was fascinating.”

Yet for years, she resisted the gravitational pull of finance. As a teenager, she wanted to be a lawyer and applied to study Law at the University of Lagos, one of Nigeria’s most sought-after universities.

After failing to gain admission, she enrolled in Redeemer’s University, a private Christian university in Ede, Osun State, southwest Nigeria, to study Sociology in 2011. She graduated in 2015.

“I just picked sociology because it seemed like something close to law,” she says. “I really didn’t know what the course was about. I just picked it, and I got in.”

During her National Youth Service Corps (NYSC), Nigeria’s mandatory one-year service programme for graduates, in 2015, she was posted to the Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research (NISER) in Ibadan, the capital of Oyo State in southwest Nigeria. There, she assisted a professor researching Nigeria’s school feeding programme. Her work involved everything from nutrition and health outcomes to religious considerations and implementation strategies.

The work demanded a level of rigour she had not encountered before.

“You would write something, and they would tell you to go back because you hadn’t gone deep enough,” she recalls. Over time, she came to appreciate the discipline, a lesson in attention to detail she still relies on today.

In the same year, her mother encouraged her to apply for banking jobs. She sat for recruitment tests for banks, including Access Bank and First Bank, two of Nigeria’s largest commercial banks.

“I dreaded it,” she says. “Everybody in my family was a banker.”

But when the offer from ESQ Trainings Limited, a Lagos-based legal training organisation, came in, she took it. She had always wanted to carve her own path, and working in a legal organisation felt like the right way to do it.

After NYSC, she joined ESQ in 2016 as a Learning and Development Specialist. The firm ran professional programmes for lawyers and the ESQ Nigerian Legal Awards, an annual event that recognises outstanding achievements across Nigeria’s legal profession.

The role brought her closer to the legal profession she had once hoped to join. Reviewing legal briefs and regulatory documents became a regular part of her work, a skill that would later prove valuable in the heavily regulated payments industry.

But something else was already forming. She found herself constantly asking how processes could be improved, whether she was organising programmes or managing submissions.

The accidental product manager

The ESQ Nigerian Legal Awards, she says, was a lot of work. Law firms submitted lengthy briefs detailing their work and achievements, and judges reviewed the entries before deciding the winners. The process was largely manual.

Submissions arrived through email. Documents moved back and forth between organisers and judges. Tracking everything required significant coordination.

Bajomo began wondering if there was a better way.

“The first digital submission platform that the organisation had was designed by me,” she says. “I used PowerPoint to design what it should look like.”

At the time, she thought she was simply helping to solve an operational problem. Then somebody she met told her that what she was doing was product management.

For the first time, Bajomo had a name for what she had been doing instinctively.

Until then, she had assumed careers in the tech sector were reserved for computer science graduates.

Curious, she began researching product management. The more she learned about the discipline, the more it appealed to her.

In 2017, she attended her first product management training, organised by Product Folks, an Indian product community, virtually. The sessions introduced her to concepts she had never encountered before. Determined to learn more, she says she started teaching herself.

Money was tight, so she relied heavily on free resources. A friend who worked in cybersecurity regularly sent her courses and learning materials. She enrolled in programmes from Product School, completed courses on LinkedIn Learning and Google.

When a designer repeatedly delayed marketing materials for the firm’s learning programmes, Bajomo says she taught herself Canva and began creating the designs. She also became increasingly involved in the firm’s digital transformation efforts, helping to automate internal processes and designing an e-learning platform for its training programmes.

By the time she left ESQ in 2019, she says she had become “a full-blown product manager.”

When payments found her

In 2020, Bajomo joined TrainQuarters, a Lagos-based e-learning platform, as a product manager. The company helped creators, businesses, and organisations sell digital products, including ebooks and video courses.

As the platform expanded, many of its customers wanted to sell to audiences outside Nigeria. That meant integrating payment solutions capable of processing transactions across different countries. Bajomo says she worked on integrating payment providers, including Paystack, Flutterwave, PayPal and later Stripe, to enable those transactions.

“It was mind-blowing,” she says. “It was beautiful.”

The role marked her first deep exposure to payments, introducing her to international transactions, card systems, and encryption.

“That was how the growth kicked up, and the whole thing just kicked in,” she says.

In 2022, after she left TrainQuarters, she joined Gokada, a Lagos-based logistics company, as a product manager. There, she worked across both the customer-facing app and Geops, the company’s internal operations platform.

“My experience in Gokada allowed me to understand operations,” she says. “I gained a lot of operational knowledge that exposed me to how settlements worked and the spending processes within organisations.”

In May 2023, Bajomo said she left Gokada and joined Remita Payment Services, a Nigerian payment technology platform, as a senior product manager.

While payments had been one layer of the work at TrainQuarters and Gokada, it became Bajomo’s major focus at Remita.

Remita holds a switching licence, which allows the company to configure Point-of-Sale (POS) systems for banks. Bajomo says she managed the entire Payment Terminal Service Provider (PTSP) suite, handling integrations with the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS)—the central infrastructure that processes and settles electronic payments in Nigeria, Interswitch, and Unified Payment Services Limited (UPSL)—a Nigerian payments infrastructure firm. She also managed Remita.net, the platform Nigerians use to make payments to the government.

“It was now the full detail of what payments and infrastructure are,” she says.

Slowly, the world she had grown up around began to make sense in a new way. “This thing that my mom used to do is what we’ve digitalised now,” she says.

In 2025, Bajomo left Remita and joined Credit Direct, a Nigerian embedded finance company, where she is currently the product lead.

“Payment was already my world,” she says, “but I wanted more.”

She says she built the company’s first payment routing engine and is leading efforts to digitise its credit products, moving a sales-led operation toward self-service.

As she moved through different roles in product and fintech, Bajomo found herself returning to one thing: explaining what she had learned to others. On LinkedIn, she began writing about payments and regulation, translating Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) circulars and industry developments into plain language for practitioners navigating an increasingly complex ecosystem.

She says aspiring fintech and product management professionals soon began reaching out with questions. Some wanted help understanding payment systems; others sought advice on transitioning into product management.

When her friend Elizabeth launched Builders in Fintech, a community and knowledge-sharing platform for people building fintech products across Africa, in 2025, Bajomo supported the initiative, offering guidance to early-career professionals and practitioners wrestling with everything from cross-border payments to NIBSS integrations.

“I always tell people to send messages, and I will respond to them as soon as possible,” she says. “It is something I do now, and I really enjoy doing it.”

But what stayed with her was discovering that people had been quietly relying on her writing. A friend once told her that someone in their office had been asking why she had stopped posting on LinkedIn.

“I didn’t know people were reading it,” she says. “So I started writing more.”

Looking back, Bajomo sees an irony in how her career unfolded. She spent years trying to avoid banking because she wanted a path that felt different from her family. Instead, she found herself building payment products and helping others understand the industry she grew up around.

“The one thing that I always ran away from is one thing that makes me happy now,” she says.

The future Bajomo sees in payments

After years of building expertise, Bajomo is increasingly focused on the challenges and opportunities ahead for African payments.

She does not think African payments are anywhere near where they need to be. She points to financial inclusion as the clearest evidence. Credit decisioning across the continent, she said, is still largely built around one question: are you a salary earner with a bank account? The millions who earn daily, deal in cash, and have never held a formal loan are still largely outside the system.

She points to the ISO 20022 migration as one of the biggest shifts on the horizon. The global messaging standard, which Nigeria’s payment system is currently moving toward, would allow Nigerian payment infrastructure to speak directly to international markets.

“Nigeria’s payment ecosystem is going to experience a huge open door with the international markets,” she says.

But growth also means greater exposure to bad actors. Nigerian financial institutions lost ₦52.26 billion ($38.409 million) to fraud in 2024, a 350% increase in fraud losses over five years, according to NIBSS data. Bajomo says she has been thinking hard about how to build fraud systems that do not just respond to known patterns but learn from data and adapt as the landscape shifts.

“As we are evolving technology, as we are building new things, we have to think of fraud too,” she says.

Away from work, Bajomo recharges with Korean movies and live bands. But her idea of travel is not just leisure.

“I want to go to African countries where I know that technology has not fully impacted them,” she says. “And how I can add knowledge and value to many of these countries.”