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Daniel Osei
I grew up in Accra, studied computer science at Ashesi University, and then spent two years at a bank in Lagos that shall remain nameless. The bank taught me two things: how money actually moves across borders in Africa (slowly, expensively, through a chain of correspondent banks that each take a cut), and that legacy financial infrastructure isn't going to fix itself.
I joined Flutterwave in 2019 as a backend engineer. Flutterwave processes payments across 34 African countries, which means dealing with 34 different regulatory frameworks, dozens of mobile money providers, multiple currencies with varying stability, and infrastructure that can be unreliable in ways that would give a Stripe engineer nightmares. My team built the reconciliation engine, the system that ensures that when someone pays for something in Nigerian naira, the merchant in Kenya gets paid in Kenyan shillings, and nobody loses money in between. It sounds simple. It is not simple. It is the hardest distributed systems problem I've ever worked on.
In 2021, I moved to Chipper Cash as a senior engineer, working on their cross-border transfer product. Chipper was growing at an insane pace, millions of users across seven African countries. The product challenge was fascinating: how do you build a financial product for users who might have a $200 smartphone, intermittent internet connectivity, and no prior relationship with formal banking? Every UX decision had to account for constraints that most Western product teams never consider.
I left Chipper in 2023 and started writing about African fintech. I was frustrated by Western tech media coverage that treated the entire continent as a single "emerging market" and ignored the massive differences between, say, mobile money in East Africa (where M-Pesa is a way of life) and card-based payments in South Africa (which looks more like Europe). The nuance matters, and it was missing.
My writing caught Signal's attention after a piece about why Stripe's Africa expansion strategy was more interesting than anyone was reporting. I broke down the regulatory, infrastructure, and cultural challenges that make African payments genuinely hard, not "hard like scaling a Rails app" hard, but "hard like building infrastructure in a market where the infrastructure for infrastructure doesn't exist yet" hard.
I'm based in Lagos now. I play chess competitively, I follow Ghanaian football religiously, and I believe that the most important fintech story of the next decade is happening in Africa, not San Francisco.
Experience
- Senior Engineer, Chipper Cash
- Backend Engineer, Flutterwave
- BS Computer Science, Ashesi University