What Nobody Tells You About Building a Fintech in Nigeria | Babatunde Akin-Moses of Sycamore NG

What does it actually take to build a fintech company in Nigeria for five years with almost no visibility, no big splash, and no shortcut — and still come out standing?Babatunde Akin-Moses had a plan. Work for ten years, save money, then start a business. He did not want to be Bill Gates, he knew he was not from that kind of family. He looked at the Nigerian entrepreneurs he admired and every single one of them had worked first. So that was the plan: Shell for NYSC because the pay was good, then KPMG and PWC to learn the kind of rigor that makes you review a document and send it back because the margin was 1.5 when it should have been 1.6. That kind of rigor.But plans move. By the time he had the idea — a credit business for the growing businesses stuck in the middle, too big for microfinance and too small for the banks to care — he had been through enough to know that the business was not just an opportunity. It was a problem he had lived. He tried to start a digital laundry company in 2013 and could not get a business loan. As an employee, the salary loan was easy. As a business owner, the bank was not interested. That gap never left him.Sycamore started as a peer-to-peer lending platform, built because they had no capital and needed to be the middle, not the lender. For two years before their first VC round, they ran on angels, friends, and family. They were closing transactions on Google Forms. And Babatunde, sitting across from a potential investor, was asked if they were raising a SAFE and had to quietly ask what a SAFE was.In this episode he goes deep on all of it, the five years of building without noise while watching louder fintech companies make headlines and then quietly disappear, the regulatory crisis where someone impersonated Sycamore and got them removed from an approved lenders list, the co-founder he nearly lost and the personal sacrifice he almost made to save the business that he has never spoken about publicly until now.He talks about the milestone nobody knows about: building their own internal financial infrastructure before they could even launch the mobile app, in a shoestring budget, in weeks. He talks about being the first digital lender formally approved in Nigeria in 2022. He talks about coming first out of 7,000 competitors at the NSIA Prize for Innovation, which sent him to Silicon Valley for six weeks and landed him on the front page of Punch. He talks about the private note that was oversubscribed, and the Cascador win that brought ₦1.5 billion and a level of public attention he still cannot fully explain.But more than the milestones, this conversation is about the philosophy underneath all of it. How he built trust in fintech — an industry where trust is the whole product — by personalizing the brand, keeping every single promise, and staying long enough for customers who were doing ₦100k transactions to grow into customers doing ₦5 million. How he thinks about servant leadership, about not being able to overcommunicate, about the tension between rewarding exceptional performance and maintaining team cohesion. How he almost never applies for grants or competitions and still keeps winning them.And what he is actually building toward: not small business support, but a platform for growing businesses — the ones with 100 employees who need debt to become the ones with 1,000. The ones who will become the Interswitches and Dangotes of tomorrow if someone will just give them the credit line they need. And eventually, a financial services product that works for Africans wherever they are in the world.