Excellence in fintech risk management: Lawal takes home NiTA’s top prize

By Damilola Fatunmise

The intersection of finance and technology has become one of the most dynamic spaces in Africa’s economic landscape, but with tremendous opportunity comes significant responsibility. The Nigeria Technology Awards have recognized Oluwaremi Ayoka Lawal as the Most Outstanding Financial Technology Risk and Compliance Professional of the Year for 2021, honouring her exceptional contributions to ensuring that fintech innovation proceeds within frameworks that protect stakeholders and maintain regulatory integrity.

The award, presented on December 11, 2021, acknowledges Lawal’s outstanding work in developing and implementing compliance strategies that help organizations navigate Nigeria’s complex regulatory environment while pursuing ambitious growth objectives. In a sector where technological change often outpaces regulatory adaptation, professionals who can bridge this gap become indispensable partners to both companies and regulators.

Lawal’s professional trajectory reflects a commitment to excellence that began with her summa cum laude graduation in Business Administration from the University of Lagos. At PricewaterhouseCoopers, where she serves as a Senior Associate specializing in transfer pricing, she has developed expertise across multiple dimensions of financial regulation and advisory services. Her work spans diverse industries including technology, finance, manufacturing, and consumer goods, providing her with broad perspective on how compliance challenges manifest across different business contexts.

Her technical work in transfer pricing has delivered substantial value to clients. She produced a benchmarking analysis and transaction testing for a cocoa manufacturing company that enabled the client to mitigate transfer pricing risks with potential losses of one hundred thousand dollars. Beyond preventing losses, her research capabilities have contributed to business development, with a comprehensive business and industry analysis for a technology client leading to an ongoing relationship that generates twenty-five thousand dollars in annual revenue for her team.
Leadership and innovation distinguish Lawal’s approach to compliance work. She managed a cross-functional team of twelve professionals in developing a financial analysis model to track related party transactions and prepare year-end transfer pricing returns for over eighty clients in just one month. The model she designed and implemented reduced statutory reporting lag time by ninety days, demonstrating how smart process design can deliver both compliance and efficiency. This initiative contributed to a fifteen percent year-over-year increase in her unit’s annual revenue through improved staff efficiency and resource allocation.

The scale of impact across Lawal’s work is impressive. She has designed and delivered multinational transfer pricing strategies valued at approximately one hundred thousand dollars for companies across finance, technology, industrials, and consumer sectors. Her benchmarking work has informed operational expenditure reductions of approximately fifteen million dollars and guided critical headcount and investment decisions for clients across multiple industries. She has prepared financial analyses and reports that demonstrate compliance with transfer pricing regulations, helping clients avoid regulatory fines and penalties that could have reached significant sums.

What makes Lawal’s recognition particularly timely is the explosive growth of Africa’s fintech sector and the regulatory challenges this growth presents. Mobile money services, digital lending platforms, cryptocurrency exchanges, and other fintech innovations are transforming how millions of Africans access financial services. These innovations promise tremendous social and economic benefits, but they also create new categories of risk that must be carefully managed to protect consumers and maintain financial stability.

The role of compliance professionals in this context extends far beyond box-checking exercises. They must understand the technical aspects of new technologies, anticipate how existing regulations apply to novel business models, work collaboratively with regulators who are themselves adapting to rapid change, and provide guidance that enables innovation while maintaining appropriate safeguards. Lawal’s work across multiple industries and her track record of delivering both compliance and business value demonstrate exactly this kind of multidimensional expertise.
The Nigeria Technology Awards, by recognizing excellence in risk and compliance, send an important signal about the values that should underpin Africa’s technological development. Innovation is essential, but sustainable innovation requires frameworks of governance, risk management, and regulatory compliance that protect all stakeholders. Professionals like Oluwaremi Lawal, who combine technical expertise with strategic thinking and leadership capabilities, represent the foundation upon which responsible fintech growth can be built.

As the fintech sector continues to evolve and expand across Africa, bringing financial services to underserved populations and creating new economic opportunities, the demand for skilled compliance professionals will only intensify. Lawal’s recognition serves as both celebration of past achievement and indication of the crucial role such professionals will play in shaping Africa’s financial future. Her work demonstrates that excellence in compliance is not about constraining innovation but about creating the conditions in which innovation can deliver lasting benefits for individuals, companies, and economies across the continent.