Olu Akanmu announced on Monday morning that he is stepping down as the president and co-CEO of Opay Nigeria after two years. It remains to be seen what his next steps will be.
Olu Akanmu has stepped down from his role as the president and co-CEO of OPay Nigeria, according to a statement published on his Twitter page on Monday morning. Akanmu, a veteran industry professional and former executive director at FCMB, joined the Nigerian division of the Chinese-backed fintech in November 2021. Under his watch, Opay saw impressive growth during Nigeria’s cash crunch, thanks to its distribution strategies and infrastructure. The company claimed to have 30 million registered users as of April this year.
“My gratitude to all my colleagues at Opay for the good work we did together in deepening financial inclusion in Nigeria, ensuring that less and less number of our people are left behind in partaking out of the opportunities of the digital financial system. Many thanks also to all our ecosystem partners and enablers who complimented us, without which we would not have been able to deliver on the lofty mission of OPay which is to ‘deepen financial inclusion through technology’,” Akanmu wrote in the statement.
Despite Opay’s win, Akanmu said in his statement that more work needs to be done collectively by stakeholders to ensure that the modern digital financial system leaves no one behind. “Collaborations, public-private partnerships, and more deliberate coordination at the digital public infrastructure, ecosystem layers, would be critical to ensure we succeed in doing the next heavy lifting to extend the digital financial rail to the next 20 million,” he said. However, it remains to be seen what his next steps will be.
