In this interview with Sunday Ehigiator, the Chief Operating Officer/Chief Technology Officer of OPay, Dotun Daniel Adekunle, reiterates that technology remains the driving force behind the company’s push to deepen financial inclusion across Africa, as the fintech deploys artificial intelligence, advanced security systems and digital infrastructure to expand access to fast, secure and seamless financial services
OPay has grown into one of Nigeria’s largest digital banking platforms, serving tens of millions of users. What technological architecture has enabled the platform to scale while maintaining reliability and speed?
Our architecture was designed around a simple customer promise: when a Nigerian taps “Send,” the money must move, every time, in seconds. Everything else flows from that. Technically, we run a distributed, microservices-based platform. Each service- wallets, transfers, cards, bills, agent banking- scales independently, so during salary weekends or festive peaks, we scale what’s under pressure without touching the rest. Three principles guide us: redundancy at every layer, so there’s no single point of failure; asynchronous processing, so a spike in one product never queues behind another; and relentless performance engineering; we measure latency in milliseconds, because a customer at a POS terminal feels every one of them. But customers don’t buy architecture. They buy trust. The architecture is simply how we keep our promise at the scale of tens of millions.
