“We had no clear path about how this was going to turn out”: Day 1-1000 of Blaaiz
Two years ago, Ifelade Ayodele began his mornings glued to the app store.
Two years ago, Ifelade Ayodele began his mornings glued to the app store. He refreshed the dashboard, checking how many people had downloaded Blaaiz, the cross-border payments startup he had launched in 2023, since he last looked. Blaaiz had about 500 users at the time, but Ayodele would tell you that he knew most of them by their first name.
Today, Ayodele says he no longer monitors app downloads. The customers he keeps tabs on are banks, fintechs, payment companies, and financial institutions, integrating the payment infrastructure he built.
To understand how he switched from building a consumer-facing app to a payment infrastructure, you have to go back further than Blaaiz’s first version, a Telegram bot, and beyond the day he decided to quit his job in 2024.
In 2022, Ayodele worked as a management consultant at Accenture’s UK office, advising financial institutions and working on projects that took him across multiple countries. He recalled that while travelling for work, he encountered the familiar challenge of cross-border payments: exchanging currencies was expensive, and transferring money digitally was slow.
“What was most apparent to me was the symptoms,” Ayodele told TechCabal in an interview on Thursday. “Why can’t I change money easily? Why is it impossible to get fair rates? I was dealing with the symptoms. For me, it was all about creating an app that had a smooth user experience.”
Convinced that the problem was worth fixing himself, Ayodele left the certainty of consulting, teamed up with his co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO), Gbenga Oni, and started building Blaaiz.
Blaaiz is building in Nigeria’s cross-border payments market, where personal remittance inflows reached $20.93 billion in 2024, according to the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN). The size of these flows presents an opportunity for companies building the infrastructure that powers them.
On his first day as a founder, Ayodele was stepping into the unknown. Leaving Accenture meant walking away from a stable consulting career into uncertainty. There was no roadmap or assurance that anyone would use what he and Oni were about to build.
“It was exciting to try out something that I had not done before,” he said. “But I was also anxious. We had no clear path as to what we were going to do or how this was going to turn out, but we decided to give it a shot.”
With just two people building the company, job titles became blurred. Ayodele said that at the beginning, he was the CEO, but he was also the product manager, business analyst, compliance lead, and the person speaking to regulators about licences.
“There were no clear KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), no structure,” he said. “Anything that came up, we just got it done.”
The first iteration of Blaaiz was a Telegram chatbot. Customers looking to send money would message the bot, choose from a list of options, receive a payment link, and continue the transaction through a series of prompts.
To find those first customers, Ayodele told TechCabal that he leaned on his network and posted the Telegram link on his WhatsApp status almost every day, asking friends to try the product and inform him of what was broken.
“At that point, it was not about making money; it was about getting people to trust what I was building,” he said. That trust eventually gave Blaaiz enough momentum to launch a standalone mobile app in early 2024.
By early 2024, Blaaiz had outgrown the Telegram bot. Ayodele explained that after months of navigating regulatory requirements, Blaaiz launched as a standalone mobile app, focused on retail cross-border payments. Initially, Blaaiz supported the Canada-Nigeria payment corridor before expanding to Europe and the UK through partnerships with Tier 1 banks, whose names Ayodele declined to disclose.
However, the launch of the new app only introduced a new obsession for Ayodele.
“There was a little bit of obsession with how many downloads we had in a day and where they were from,” he said. “At some point, I knew all our customers by their first names.”
That closeness gave him an unfiltered view of what customers genuinely wanted. Ayodele said he observed that customers wanted more payment corridors and more supported currencies. Blaaiz could satisfy some of those requests, but some required infrastructure that the startup did not have access to.
Curious to discover if the problem was unique to Blaaiz, Ayodele said he began studying about 10 competing remittance apps, which he did not disclose. He stated that many platforms supported a handful of payment corridors, while promising more countries and services labelled as coming soon. He realised that the bottleneck was the underlying infrastructure.
“It became obvious that the rails the customers wanted, we couldn’t provide them in the way they wanted them,” he said. “It began to dawn on us that it was not a Blaaiz-specific problem.”
Ayodele concluded that the real opportunity lay in building the infrastructure that would allow remittance apps, fintechs, and payment companies to expand into new markets without doing the heavy lifting themselves.
By late 2024, Blaaiz began repositioning itself from an app that helped consumers move money to a payments infrastructure company that integrated with banks and payment rails to enable financial institutions to offer cross-border payments to their customers.
“There was a bit of a conflict in our messaging, but we knew what we wanted, and then we just stayed true to our new value proposition,” Ayodele said.
In his telling, that transition was facilitated by the heavy investment the team put in while building the consumer app. He added that moving from a consumer-facing app to selling infrastructure came with challenges, including more exhaustive due diligence processes and strengthening its compliance position across jurisdictions to secure banking partnerships and users.
By 2025, the challenges that came with Blaaiz’s pivot were beginning to pay off. Blaaiz had become profitable, and to Ayodele, that was a signal that the new strategy was working, and that meant it was time to go further.
“I remember telling my staff that this is the time we needed to start to make very consequential moves to become truly bankable and go for the higher reward,” he said.
Unlike the early days when he wore many hats, Ayodele’s attention was now fixed on establishing partnerships with institutions he did not disclose and securing licences in Blaaiz’s operational markets. Today, Blaaiz holds an International Money Transfer Operator (IMTO) licence in Nigeria, a money services business (MSB) licence and payment service provider (PSP) registration in Canada, among others, while actively pursuing a money transmitter licence (MTL) across states in the United States.
