Nomba, a Nigerian payments company, has rewarded a 17-year-old developer with the $4,000 grand prize at its maiden hackathon after he built an artificial intelligence-powered tool that helps small businesses track credit sales through WhatsApp voice notes in local languages.
Abdullah Ajala emerged winner of the five-week Nomba x DevCareer Hackathon, beating more than 1,000 developers who participated in the competition designed to encourage developers to build commercially viable financial technology solutions using Nomba’s payment infrastructure.
Ajala’s winning solution, PayWise, enables traders to record customers’ debts through WhatsApp voice notes in English, Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa. The AI-powered assistant automatically logs transactions, tracks outstanding balances, sends payment reminders and updates records once debts are settled.
The innovation addresses a common challenge among informal businesses that still rely on paper notebooks to record credit transactions, exposing them to losses when records are misplaced or damaged.
“The aim was never to just build something to demo,” Jafer Shariff, Nomba’s vice president of product, said.
