In this interview with Sunday Ehigiator, the Chief Operating Officer/Chief Technology Officer of OPay, Dotun Daniel Adekunle, reiterates that technology remains the driving force behind the company’s push to deepen financial inclusion across Africa, as the fintech deploys artificial intelligence, advanced security systems and digital infrastructure to expand access to fast, secure and seamless financial services OPay has grown into one of Nigeria’s largest digital banking platforms, serving tens of millions of users. What technological architecture has enabled the platform to scale while maintaining reliability and speed? Our architecture was designed around a simple customer promise: when a Nigerian taps “Send,” the money must move, every time, in seconds. Everything else flows from that. Technically, we run a distributed, microservices-based platform. Each service- wallets, transfers, cards, bills, agent banking- scales independently, so during salary weekends or festive peaks, we scale what’s under pressure without touching the rest. Three principles guide us: redundancy at every layer, so there’s no single point of failure; asynchronous processing, so a spike in one product never queues behind another; and relentless performance engineering; we measure latency in milliseconds, because a customer at a POS terminal feels every one of them. But customers don’t buy architecture. They buy trust. The architecture is simply how we keep our promise at the scale of tens of millions. System downtime can significantly impact customer trust in digital banking. What measures has OPay put in place to ensure high system availability, business continuity, and operational resilience? We treat availability as a product feature because we are very much aware that downtimes are not just technical inconveniences but a breach of trust. We cannot afford to allow a customer to be locked out of their own money for minutes – they will remember it for years. Our resilience rests on redundant infrastructure across multiple availability zones, progressive software rollouts that catch defects before they become incidents, real-time monitoring of thousands of health signals with automatic failover, and live disaster recovery drills. Beyond our over 99 per cent availability, the metric I personally watch is how fast a transaction completes during our busiest hour, because that is where customers actually experience resilience. Cyber threats are becoming increasingly sophisticated. How does OPay protect customer data and financial transactions against evolving cybersecurity risks? Guarding people’s life savings demands that security be engineered in, not bolted on, a point I made on cybersecurity at the CBN’s Payments System Vision 2028 launch. At the platform level, our defence is layered: advanced threat detection, encryption in transit and at rest, independent penetration testing, Industry Standard certification, and zero-trust access internally. But security must also live where the customer lives, so we built the now well-known nine OPay security features that protect customers at the frontline: Large Transaction Shield, Large Transaction Double Check, USSD Lock, Online Subscription Control, Location Guard, Emergency Lock, Scam Alert, Safety PIN and Night Guard. Powerful protection, directly in the customer’s hands, from our data centres to their fingertips. And because many breaches begin with social engineering, not clever code, we invest heavily in awareness for staff, merchants, agents and customers: we will never ask for your PIN or OTP, and we say so constantly. Digital fraud remains one of the biggest challenges in the fintech ecosystem. How is OPay leveraging artificial intelligence, machine learning, or other emerging technologies to detect and prevent fraudulent activities in real time? Fraud today is industrialised, organised, adaptive, fast. Rules-based systems can’t keep pace because fraudsters study the rules. Machine learning studies the fraudsters. Our fraud engine scores every transaction in real time, in milliseconds, before it completes, using hundreds of signals: behavioural patterns, device fingerprints, transaction velocity, deviations from a customer’s habits. Graph-based analysis then lets us fight fraud at the network level, identifying and dismantling webs of connected mule accounts, not just single bad transactions. And the goal is that honest customers never notice any of it; the fraudulent transaction stops, the legitimate one sails through. Innovation often involves balancing speed with security. How does OPay ensure that new products and features are introduced without compromising platform stability or customer protection? I reject the idea that it’s a trade-off. Speed without safety is recklessness; safety without speed is irrelevant. The discipline is to build safety into the delivery pi
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