Insights & Perspectives

Thinking on fintech,
payments & leadership

30 years of building across payments, enterprise software, and energy technology. Writing about what actually works — and what the industry gets wrong.

FeaturedPayments

Cross-border payments shouldn't feel this slow in a real-time world

June 2025 · 4 min read

The real bottleneck isn't regulation — it's infrastructure. The businesses pulling ahead are already fixing that, prioritising speed, transparency, and control.

Cross-border payments have a perception problem. Everyone blames compliance, regulation, and correspondent banking friction. And yes, those are real. But having built payment rails across 12 African markets, I'll tell you the deeper problem: most infrastructure simply wasn't designed for the world we live in now.

The average cross-border B2B payment in Africa still takes 3–5 business days. That's not a regulatory number — that's a legacy systems number. When we rebuilt PixelPay's routing engine from scratch, we didn't wait for regulators to move. We built around them.

The businesses winning right now have made a decision: they stopped waiting for infrastructure to catch up and started building their own.

Learn what we're building →

1 / 6Mobile money agents, Lagos

OpinionLeadership

What 30 years of building software companies taught me about hiring

May 2025 · 3 min read

I've hired hundreds of people across three continents. The single biggest predictor of success has nothing to do with their CV.

When I started Kennedy Data Systems in 2005, I made every hiring mistake in the book. I hired for credentials. I hired for confidence. I hired people who interviewed well and delivered poorly.

After two decades of building and running software teams, the signal I trust most is this: how does someone respond when they're wrong?

The engineers I've kept longest — across Shell Trading, Logica, and now PixelPay — are the ones who run toward the problem. They don't explain it away, they fix it and document what broke.

1 / 6Engineering team standup

Market InsightAfrica Tech

Africa's fintech moment is real — but the infrastructure gap will kill it if we don't act

April 2025 · 5 min read

The investment numbers look incredible. The user growth is genuinely exciting. But the rails underneath most African fintech products are held together with workarounds.

Every six months, a new report declares Africa the world's fastest-growing fintech market. The numbers aren't wrong. Mobile money penetration, smartphone adoption, the unbanked opportunity — all real, all significant.

But spend any time building on the actual infrastructure and a different picture emerges. Payment APIs that timeout under load. Settlement systems that batch daily in a world that expects real-time.

I'm not pessimistic about African fintech. I'm building it. But the gap between the narrative and the infrastructure reality is still wide.

See how PixelPay is fixing the rails →

1 / 6African payment adoption growth

PracticalPayments

Your business deserves payments that move as fast as you do

March 2025 · 3 min read

With the right infrastructure, collecting, processing, and growing without limits isn't a pitch — it's a technical decision.

I spent four years at Shell Trading building systems that had to process millions of dollars in commodity trades in under a second. The infrastructure demands were brutal, but the discipline it created shaped how I think about every payment system I've built since.

Speed in payments isn't a luxury. It's a trust signal. When a payment clears instantly, your customer feels it.

At PixelPay, we designed the core transaction layer with sub-second settlement as a baseline, not a premium. That's not marketing language — it's an architecture decision.

Step into smarter payments →