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Lead Developer Ifeanyi Hilary Madu helped build Pesa’s original wallet and transaction systems before leading its 2023 migration to a more scalable architecture.
As Africa’s freelance and digital-services economy expanded, receiving payments from international clients remained difficult for many workers and small businesses. Cross-border fees, currency-conversion challenges and limited access to suitable financial services often reduced the value of opportunities available to them.
Pesa was launched in 2021 to address some of those barriers. Founded by Tolu Osho, Yusuf Yakubu and Adewale Afolabi, the fintech company developed a platform through which users could receive international payments, hold and convert multiple currencies, create payment links and settle funds locally.
The company began operating in Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya, serving freelancers, entrepreneurs, digital sellers and small businesses. A team of Nigerian technology professionals was responsible for turning the founders’ idea into a functioning financial product.
Among Pesa’s earliest engineers was Ifeanyi Hilary Madu, who served as Lead Developer and worked closely with co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Yusuf Yakubu across the first two versions of the platform.
On Pesa’s original platform, Madu designed and built several of the systems required for its financial operations. These included a multi-currency wallet with real-time balance updates and reconciliation, an API-driven payment-link system for merchants and a transaction engine incorporating concurrency controls, integrity checks and regional compliance requirements.
The systems were designed to keep balances accurate while users received, converted and transferred money across different currencies and markets.
“This was truly a collaborative effort, but I want to especially acknowledge Ifeanyi Hilary Madu,” Yakubu said. “His dedication and skill were essential to getting Pesa off the ground.”
Madu’s involvement with Pesa continued beyond the original launch. In 2023, as the company prepared its Version 2 platform for greater transaction volumes and international expansion, he returned to lead its technical re-platforming.
The original monolithic application was divided into independently managed services covering wallets, remittances, payouts and merchant APIs. Madu defined the boundaries between those services and established the data contracts through which they communicated.
He also introduced Kubernetes for deployment and orchestration and established continuous integration and deployment processes incorporating automated testing and deployment controls. Autoscaling was configured to respond to changing transaction volumes, while additional logging and observability helped engineers trace transactions and resolve production incidents more quickly.
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According to Yakubu, the migration reduced average transaction latency by approximately 40 per cent, improved reliability during peak periods and supported the rollout of services in new countries with near-zero downtime.
“I collaborated closely with Ifeanyi through Versions 1 and 2 of our platform,” Yakubu said. “He was a key driver of the architecture that underpins our reliability and scale. The architectural decisions he drove still underpin how our product runs today.”
The engineering changes came as Pesa was expanding beyond its original African markets. The company says it has now processed more than $380 million in transactions across four continents and reached profitability within two years.
Its product offering has grown to include cross-border payment services, multi-currency wallets and treasury tools for individuals and businesses operating across Africa, Canada, Europe and Asia.
Pesa reached another stage in its international expansion in 2025 through the acquisition of Authoripay Emoney, a UK-based electronic money institution.
The acquisition gave Pesa access to permissions granted by the UK Financial Conduct Authority for money remittance, electronic-money issuance, payment initiation and virtual IBAN services. It also strengthened the company’s ability to operate in the UK and serve the wider European market.
Authoripay was subsequently rebranded as Pesapeer Payments. The acquired business was projected to contribute approximately $80 million in annualised transaction volume to Pesa’s operations.
The acquisition also transferred Authoripay’s Mastercard Principal Membership, giving Pesa the capability to issue and acquire Mastercard-branded cards. The company plans to use this capability to introduce multi-currency debit and prepaid cards for individuals and businesses.
Pesa has described the acquisition as part of its wider effort to build an accessible financial platform for people and businesses operating across borders. Its expanded regulatory position is expected to support additional services and broader European coverage.
The company’s development has involved teams working across engineering, product, operations, compliance and leadership. Its progression from an early payment service operating in three African countries to an international fintech business also required its underlying technology to evolve alongside its commercial ambitions.
Madu’s work covered two important stages of that evolution. He helped build the wallet, merchant-payment and transaction capabilities used in Pesa’s original product and later led the architectural changes introduced as the company prepared for greater scale.
Those two phases, creating the first working platform and re-engineering it for growth, form part of the technical foundation behind Pesa’s expansion from an African fintech startup into a financial technology company reporting hundreds of millions of dollars in international transactions.
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