Nomba awards teen developer $4000 for AI tool built for SMEs

Nomba, a Nigerian payments company, has rewarded a 17-year-old developer with the $4,000 grand prize at its maiden hackathon after he built an artificial intelligence-powered tool that helps small businesses track credit sales through WhatsApp voice notes in local languages.

Abdullah Ajala emerged winner of the five-week Nomba x DevCareer Hackathon, beating more than 1,000 developers who participated in the competition designed to encourage developers to build commercially viable financial technology solutions using Nomba’s payment infrastructure.

Ajala’s winning solution, PayWise, enables traders to record customers’ debts through WhatsApp voice notes in English, Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa. The AI-powered assistant automatically logs transactions, tracks outstanding balances, sends payment reminders and updates records once debts are settled.

The innovation addresses a common challenge among informal businesses that still rely on paper notebooks to record credit transactions, exposing them to losses when records are misplaced or damaged.

“The aim was never to just build something to demo,” Jafer Shariff, Nomba’s vice president of product, said.

“The aim was to ship something live, something customers can actually use and enjoy, and maybe something that becomes the foundation of a business for the developers themselves.”

The hackathon ran from June 30 to July 7, giving developers access to Nomba’s application programming interfaces (APIs), including checkout, virtual accounts, transfers and webhooks, across software development and infrastructure tracks.

According to the organisers, every participant who completed the programme launched a live product rather than a prototype, with the competition focused on practical applications capable of solving real business problems.

Ajala said the idea for PayWise came from observing small traders in his community struggle to keep track of customers’ debts using handwritten notebooks.

Rather than creating a standalone application, he built the solution within WhatsApp, arguing that the messaging platform is already widely used by Nigeria’s small businesses.

“The harder part of the build was not the WhatsApp integration but getting voice notes in Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa to convert into text the AI could work with,” he said, adding that much of the five-week development period was spent improving speech recognition across local languages and accents.

He also noted that testing the product with real traders proved more challenging than writing the software itself, reinforcing the importance of product validation.

Second place went to Glasspot, which received $1,500 for building a digital savings platform modelled after Nigeria’s informal cooperative savings schemes, allowing groups to contribute towards shared financial goals under pre-defined rules.

Paye claimed third place and a $1,000 prize for developing a payment orchestration platform that enables merchants to integrate once while routing transactions across multiple payment providers, including Nomba, OPay, Paystack and Flutterwave.

Pelumi Aboluwarin, Nomba’s co-founder and chief technology officer, said opening the company’s infrastructure to external developers was intended to encourage innovation beyond the organisation.

“What separates a hackathon build from something you’d trust with real money is whether it survives the same scrutiny we put our own systems through, and PayWise did,” Aboluwarin said.

He said participants built their products using the same payment infrastructure deployed by Nomba’s commercial merchants rather than a simplified demonstration environment.

The hackathon forms part of the company’s broader strategy to expand its developer ecosystem through certifications, affiliate incentives and continued support for promising fintech products beyond the competition.