The entrepreneurship landscape in Nigeria is very different from what it used to be a decade ago. More young people are building phenomenal businesses that are solving societal problems and creating more jobs for people in the process.
John Oluranti Oke is one of such persons. A Computer Science graduate from the University of Ilorin, Kwara State and a Future Awards Africa (TFAA) nominee for Technology.
John Oluranti Oke is a Software Engineer from Nigeria. He is the co-founder/CEO of Wallet.ng, a digital wallet/payments solution that allows users to make payments, transfer funds, pay bills and withdraw from ATMs. He co-founded Wallets Africa with his friend, Joseph Benson-Aruna to help users enjoy a seamless payment experience.
He previously worked for Suregifts, a gift voucher company as a Senior Software Engineer, where he helped build the first version of the Sureremit app. He also led a successful integration between Suregifts and Safaricom’s M-Pesa to help users pay for goods at M-Pesa till using gift vouchers.
While working at Suregifts, the Idea for Wallets Africa first crossed his mind. He noticed one could make use of a Suregifts voucher to pay at an M-Pesa till at a mall or to get tickets at an IMAX cinema in Nairobi. That was when he realized that all financial transactions could be done through a digital wallet.
Oke started working and consulting for banks like Wema Bank where he worked on several projects that helped transform the bank’s operational processes, interfacing with and building on the bank’s Core Banking Application (Finacle).
He also worked for fintech companies like Interswitch. Working in these companies helped him to gain some experience in how things work in the financial space before he started building Wallets Africa.
Oke also founded some companies in the past like, Ngfeeds.com, a news aggregating platform that uses pattern matching algorithms to get news, gossips, and content every minute from the most visited websites in Nigeria and delivers the resulting content to users over a website.
In 2014, he founded Geeks14 Inc, a software development company that has serviced and consulted for clients across Nigeria.
Wallets Africa currently has over 5,000 businesses and 70,000 users who make use of their services daily.
