Hi, guys. Welcome to Building Fintech by Jeremy Code. A weekly show where I share important concepts and topics in Fintech. Jeremy Code is a podcast for fintech nerds building in Africa.
This will be the first-ever episode on how I got into Fintech. So you can NFT it.
It’s going to be weekly, where I will publish once a week, but you might get more than one piece of content in a week.
Just to give you guys some background information, my name is Jeremy “Code” Ikwuje. I have been working professionally since 2020. I started my coding journey as far back as 2017 during my undergraduate studies.
How I got into fintech started with a phone call in October 2018.
I received a call from a friend who was trying to come up with a site for a client, and the client needed a payment system on the site. The client wanted to accept payment from Nigerians. My friend called to ask if I knew any payment system to integrate.
I recommended Paystack.
I’ve been following up with the Paystack story on Techpoint, so it was an easy recommendation.
So he went in and looked at Paystack and how he could integrate it, but he had some difficulties with it.
He reached out to me again and told me that he’s trying to integrate Paystack into his website, but he’s unable to write it in PHP at the time. I said, okay, I’ll just try my best to look at it and then get back to you.
I was in class at the time he called, and I went back to the hostel. I picked up my laptop, and throughout that night I consumed the entire Paystack documentation.
Payment gateways were still new in Africa, so it was hard to find a really good article at the time on integrating with PHP. Today it would be easier because AI is here and can help you integrate the entire thing end to end.
I was able to integrate the Paystack checkout payment that night, and I sent my friend a sample code, and he was able to implement it, and it worked.
But then I felt, instead of me just giving him a sample code, let me write an article on this. Funny enough, at the time, I was trying out blogging for some side income as a student. So I put out the article on the internet, and about a week or two, developers began to reach out to me to send them more sample code, asking me questions about how to integrate it.
I was jumping on a call at least once a week to help someone out. I started getting gigs from small business owners asking me to setup payment system for them. That single article brought in a client that sent me my first million naira in 2020.
That was when I knew that fintech is going to be a big thing, especially in Africa, because every new week a new fintech startup springs up and you see that they are integrated with Paystack.
That was how I got into payment and fintech.
Since then, I left school and got my first job in 2020 for a real estate investment company, and I built a payment system for them to be able to receive investment from their clients and disburse to vendors. Within 6 months, they were able to process more than a million dollars. That same year, I got another gig for a crowdfunding app that let users invest in farmland; remember FarmCrowdy?
I went on to start my own company in 2021 to allow people to buy Bitcoin before winding it down in 2022. I’ve gone on to work for several startups, mostly payments companies, including contracting for Paystack.
In 2023, I launched Monierate.xyz with my cofounder, an FX data aggregator with over 10 million pageviews.
Today, I mostly work around stablecoins and cross-border payments. Currently the lead engineer at Spendin, the Revolut of Africa.
The last six to seven years have been a very good ride in the fintech space, and there are still more niches in fintech. Fintech is something that we need, especially in Africa.
I’ll recommend anyone starting a tech career, especially in Africa, to go into Fintech. There are more successful startups in Fintech than any other startup category you can think of.
VC loves fintech, and it is important to follow the money. We are going to see a trillion-dollar fintech soon.
In the Building Fintech series, I’ll be sharing everything I know about building fintech, explaining every single important concept.
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