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By Benson Michael
The Technology Venture Leadership Award recognizes professionals who are not only shaping various sectors with bold ideas but also creating meaningful systems that serve society’s pressing needs. This year, the spotlight shines brightly on Chinelo Menkiti, whose work through Fintelle has earned her this coveted honor.
This achievement rests on her ability to envision a financial future where inclusion is not a feature but a foundation. She built a platform designed to address one of the nation’s most persistent economic exclusions which is the inability of informal workers to access credit. The company uses alternative data and behavioral patterns to establish credit histories for users typically locked out of traditional finance.
Her background in finance and risk assessment gave her the technical foundation, but it is Chinelo’s human-centered approach that drives her success. Rather than treating financial exclusion as a statistical problem, she approached it as a design failure and one she could correct by starting at the margins and working inward. Today, it serves hundreds of thousands of users, from urban gig workers to rural petty-traders, proving that accessibility and integrity can go hand in hand.
Reaching the top of one’s career is a rare achievement and winning an award like the Technology Venture Leadership Award is proof that an entrepreneur is one of the top leading business experts impacting the business landscape in Nigeria.
It signifies not just a personal victory but also the recognition of one’s contribution to advancing the industry. The award places recipients among an elite group of innovators who have demonstrated exceptional talent and leadership in their fields.
Her influence now extends beyond the product she created. She is a mentor, a strategist, and a voice for sustainable inclusion in the tech system. Through advisory boards, community outreach, and leadership programs, she continues to shape how young innovators view entrepreneurship not as a race for capital, but a craft of relevance.
Her vision of a more inclusive financial system is no longer a dream on the edges as it is being realized, one user, one community, and one decision at a time. And in that vision, the industry sees not just the future of fintech, but the future of trust.
