Runsewe: There’s Room for Growth in Nigeria’s Tech Ecosystem for Women

Fintech product leader, Seun Runsewe speaks about thriving as a woman in the technology space, cyber crime, and the latest trends in technology. Nosa Alekhuogie presents the excerpts:

Tell us a bit about you.
I am a fintech product Leader in Nigeria. I am working on gathering everything that I have learnt in my decade of advising financial institutions, building financial technology companies, and sharing that knowledge with people who are looking to do the same. I am doing this in collaboration with AltSchool. I am really looking forward to people being able to build billion-dollar products from contents like this. So, it’s a pretty exciting project I am working on.

What other projects are you working on?
I am working on building an inclusive healthcare product for women, so I’ve been doing design products for pregnant women for the past five years with my business called Biamo Technologies, but now we are working on a device that would help women go back to the workforce, feel more freedom but also being available to nurture their children and their families. It’s a hands-free breast bump device that is in the pipeline. I am excited about that. We are going to roll out here in Nigeria as well as in the United Kingdom, which is my biggest project at the moment.

Something else that is interesting is my career, but I just pivoted from building products to cyber security. I am currently getting a master’s degree in cyber security, and it is special to me because I think that what has brought me this far is being able to learn and pivot, understand what’s valuable on the market and upskill myself, and hopefully, that young women especially see that and feel that they too can learn. You can do and learn anything if you want to.
I have just created a card game that I want to open to the fintech ecosystem on teaching their staff or their employees how to be more security conscious to keep attacks like cyber security attacks at bay. Helping employees to be more aware and educated about security. That’s another project that’s in the pipeline.

What do you think has been holding women back in the fintech space?
I agree that there is a gap, and I can’t deny that. There are a lot of lessons that I learnt along the way because I still remember my female friends and I talking about this with tears rolling down our eyes. We learnt to be as bold as the men, we learnt to assume space as much as the men, and there is also an innate culture in tech that allows the men to thrive. So, if we deconstruct it, men are bold. Men understand that they can make mistakes, they can fail, and they would take lessons from that experience and go again. It is also a fairer playing field; I do not need to know anybody’s daddy to thrive at tech. I can go at this thing and be the best at it.

There is also the idea of talking boldly like the men do. You must learn how to do that. You must learn how to be visible and how to be seen so that people would think of you. If you think of products in Nigeria today, there is no way my name is not going to come up. So, the question is, what do I need to do to be visible so that people would think of me? People would want to do business with me. There is also the fact that I must be on my toes and do my best work. There is no gender in the quality of work. Your work has to be better than the men because you have to open the door for other younger women. So, when you talk about challenges in technology, having a tribe of women helps because it really helped me; building in public also helped.

Understanding that there is no limit for me as the biggest battles is in the mind. So, fighting that battle, getting help, talking to my friends, talking to girls just like me who are facing the same challenges. We learned to weather the challenges together and being open to learning, asking questions, be stupid in public if you have to.

Something else that helped me was communicating my values, first to myself, then to my team, my company and more importantly to my industry, because that is what made me visible. Do not work, add value, and hide. Scream and shout at the rooftop. That helps you because our ecosystem is still shallow, so the more women who come out and say, I am this, this is what I have done, this is the value I have provided, amazing! But of course, you have to do good work. You cannot cut corners. More importantly, when you learn to grow in tech, teach other people because I think it’s that same spirit of teaching; that same spirit of I want to teach other people is one thing that has helped my career growth because I must teach. If I learn something, I will teach it because that is what leads you to create content like articles and videos, people then understand that this person knows it.

Can you share some biggest projects you have worked on?
I think my biggest baby is OPay. I have so many babies that are so precious to me, but the first ever product that I worked on was with a bank at Paystack. It was the first time in the Nigerian ecosystem that people could put in their bank account numbers, your bank would send you an OTP, and you pay online. It was the first time in our ecosystem. That was so dear to me.

Then, building Switch from scratch. Switch is a digital bank that is an offshoot of Sterling bank. It was the second digital bank seen in the ecosystem. I grew a team to thirteen people, and it was the first time a bank was assuming a platform model, which was then what formed the bedrock of my subsequent projects. That was when I was called the youngest banking CEO in Africa at the time. I learned so much.

And now, Chipper cash because I feel like this is the big girl stage where I’m serving a global market, and I’m also working on securing us, which is like end to end what I am about. On a special note, this breast pump that I am working on is very special to me because there are components of it that are specific to black women, and I am submitting a patent for it, I am hoping that it shakes the industry.

What hurdle have you faced in the fintech space, especially in Nigeria?
I would not frame it as a challenge, it is a learning opportunity. In the Nigerian market, of course, there are things like, you know, ‘Nigerians are Nigerians’ whether it is in tech or not. I have learnt the dance of managing them. Being able to apply the nuance of Nigerianism to doing business and building people and products is interesting. Nigerian relationship management is a huge part of being successful in Nigeria.

It is a challenge of the mind where I thought that I could have been limited, or I always limited myself because I have been conditioned to do so. It is the woman factor, and that is the Nigerianism I am talking about. So, that can also be a part of how people see you.
They think like, ‘You are a woman, now, you are supposed to stay in HR’, it’s a shocker when you see a woman reaching, growing and being ambitious. It can be a struggle to settle in or be part of the Nigerian ecosystem as an ambitious woman, but we are seeing more of that. You have to be stubborn and be openly ambitious with your choice.

What latest trends should we look out for and tap into?
I think we should look out for gaming. We should look out for new applications of technology. So, gaming is interesting, and augmented reality is interesting. Metaverse is going to be interesting as well. Have you heard of Web3? There is a lot of growth. It is like a balloon with the way young people can capture value for it. There is a lot of money in the sale of non-Fungible tokens (NFTs), and there are also new applications for the technology. The Gig economy is so interesting at the moment.

What can be done to curb rising cybercrime?
There are two major things; One is robust security awareness training and sensitisation organisation wide because an organisation is as safe as the weakest link. Two, we need to share incident responses as it should not be kept a secret. Additionally, we need to band together as an ecosystem. Let us share notes so that we can haveindustry-wide reports. If I see a pattern, I have learnt that if this happens, this is what I should do about it.
Having more ecosystem-wide education would be amazing. For example, if something happens in Sterling bank, Citi bank should know so that if they see a semblance of it in their own system, they know what to do or they know how to block it.