Paga founder Tayo Oviosu steps back from day-to-day operations as company turns 17 and enters new growth phase

Tayo Oviosu, the founder of Nigerian fintech company Paga Group, is stepping back from running the company’s daily operations to focus entirely on its next chapter: new markets, stablecoins, cryptocurrency, and artificial intelligence, as the company marks 17 years in business.

Oviosu retains his titles as Group Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of both the Group Board and Paga Nigeria’s board, but his focus shifts fully to expansion.

Ope Oyinloye, who has spent seven years at the company, has been named Group Chief Operating Officer and will also serve as the acting chief executive of Paga Nigeria, pending approval from the Central Bank of Nigeria.

Co-founder Jay Alabraba takes on a new role as Group Director of Special Projects, initially leading the company’s push into lending and supporting Oviosu on new market entry across Africa.

The reshuffling is not a crisis response. The company is doing well. In 2025, the company processed 169 million transactions worth over $11 billion, equivalent to more than $1 billion moving through its infrastructure every month. That is 17 times the value it was processing in 2021. Net revenues grew fivefold over the same period.

Over 265 enterprise clients, including PayPal, Meta, Amazon, Tencent, and LemFi, now build on Paga Engine, the company’s financial infrastructure platform. The Financial Times and Statista also recognised the company as one of Africa’s fastest-growing companies for three consecutive years: 2023, 2024, and 2025.

The leadership change is a bet on what comes next.

From payments company to infrastructure play: What comes next for Paga?

Paga launched in 2009 as a consumer payments business built on a nationwide agent network.

Over 17 years, it has evolved into something significantly more ambitious. It has built a full-stack financial services infrastructure provider serving enterprises, consumers, and merchants through three distinct platforms: Paga Engine, the Paga consumer app, and Doroki, a retail and SME management tool.

Oviosu calls what is coming “Act 2.” The priorities are clear: deepen the company’s infrastructure to connect Africans to global financial rails, expand into new African markets, and launch emerging technology products through Paga Labs, the company’s internal unit focused on stablecoins, cryptocurrency, and AI.

Similar read: Paga promises to address unresolved PayPal issues

The thinking is that the next decade of African finance will be shaped by new forms of money movement, and Paga wants to be the company that builds that infrastructure.

“Act 1 proved that we could build a profitable, high-growth infrastructure business that the world’s leading companies trust,” Oviosu said. “Act 2 is about taking that infrastructure to its full potential.”

Oyinloye, who now holds the most operational responsibility in the group, framed his mandate. “Paga has spent seventeen years becoming the kind of company that makes things work quietly and at scale,” he said.“That is exactly the competency Act 2 requires.”

For a company that started with the mission of making it simple for a billion people to access and use money, the structure is now in place to find out how far that ambition can actually go.

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