Two years ago, Ifelade Ayodele began his mornings glued to the app store. He refreshed the dashboard, checking how many people had downloaded Blaaiz, the cross-border payments startup he had launched in 2023, since he last looked. Blaaiz had about 500 users at the time, but Ayodele would tell you that he knew most of them by their first name.
Today, Ayodele says he no longer monitors app downloads. The customers he keeps tabs on are banks, fintechs, payment companies, and financial institutions, integrating the payment infrastructure he built.
To understand how he switched from building a consumer-facing app to a payment infrastructure, you have to go back further than Blaaiz’s first version, a Telegram bot, and beyond the day he decided to quit his job in 2024.
In 2022, Ayodele worked as a management consultant at Accenture’s UK office, advising financial institutions and working on projects that took him across multiple countries. He recalled that while travelling for work, he encountered the familiar challenge of cross-border payments: exchanging currencies was expensive, and transferring money digitally was slow.
“What was most apparent to me was the symptoms,” Ayodele told TechCabal in an interview on Thursday. “Why can’t I change money easily? Why is it impossible to get fair rates? I was dealing with the symptoms. For me, it was all about creating an app that had a smooth user experience.”
