Emmanuel Ajao is the founder and chief executive officer of Profiled Nigeria, a trust and identity verification platform focused on preventing fraud and reducing risk in Nigeria’s digital and physical interactions.
With close to two decades of experience spanning cyber defence, systems analysis, and technology strategy, Ajao’s career has been shaped by direct exposure to how large-scale systems fail when trust and accountability are treated as assumptions rather than design principles.
Before founding Profiled Nigeria, he worked across environments where security frameworks appeared robust on paper but often collapsed under real-world pressure, an experience that deeply influenced his approach to risk, verification, and infrastructure.
A trained cyber defence and forensics analyst, Ajao has spent years observing how fraud, impersonation, and identity abuse persist across Nigeria’s digital ecosystem.
In this interview with Techeconomy, Emmanuel Ajao speaks on his plans to help normalise accountability in digital spaces, reducing fraud, increasing confidence, and enabling Nigerians to participate more fully in the digital economy with less risk and fewer regrets. Excerpt:
TE: You’ve spent nearly two decades working across tech strategy and systems. Looking back, what early experiences impacted how you think about risk, trust, and accountability today?
Emmanuel Ajao (EA): That question assumes I learned these lessons gently. I didn’t.
Most of my early years in tech were spent in rooms where everything looked secure on paper but behaved very differently in real life. Systems passed audits. Dashboards were green. Everyone said “we’re covered.” And then something small would break, and the fallout would be… educational.
One moment that really shaped me was watching a single unchecked assumption cascade into a full system failure. That’s when it clicked for me that trust in tech isn’t about good intentions or seniority or how long someone’s been around. It’s about structure.
If accountability isn’t designed into the system, you’re just borrowing trust and hoping it doesn’t expire at the wrong time.
So those early experiences trained me to be deeply suspicious of anything that relies on “everyone knows what they’re doing.”
Because eventually, someone doesn’t. And when that happens, the system either absorbs the mistake or collapses around it.
That lens has followed me ever since and it’s the foundation of how I think about risk today: not as something dramatic, but as something quietly compounding when no one is paying attention.
TE: Before Profiled, what patterns did you repeatedly see in Nigeria’s digital space that convinced you something fundamental was broken?
EA: Before Profiled Nigeria, three patterns kept showing up.
First, fraud wasn’t happening by chance. It was organised and repeatable. The same scams kept working because information was not shared. If someone was blocked on one platform, they simply moved to another and continued. There was no memory, no real consequence.
Second, verification was treated as a one-time task instead of an ongoing process. Once an ID or phone number was verified, that was it. But people change, behaviours change, and risk changes. Verification should reflect that, not stay frozen in time.
Third, the people doing the right thing were the ones suffering most. Honest users and businesses had to deal with delays, extra checks, and constant suspicion, yet they were still vulnerable. Meanwhile, sophisticated bad people exploited every gap.
When a system makes life harder for honest people and easier for dishonest ones, it’s clear that something is fundamentally wrong.
TE: Many people talk about “innovation.” Very few choose to tackle trust, which is harder. Why did you choose this problem?
EA: Because trust is the problem beneath every other problem. Over the years, I’ve watched very smart people build impressive products, only for them to struggle or completely fall apart.
Not because the idea was bad, but because people simply didn’t trust that system or product enough to use it.
In Nigeria especially, trust is everything. You can build fast products, beautiful apps, and viral platforms, but if people don’t feel safe using them, the growth eventually collapses. Trust forces you to deal with real human behaviour, which is key and foundational.
I chose this problem very deliberately. Trust compounds. Every identity we verify properly, every fraud attempt we prevent, every system we strengthen, it builds on the last one. Over time, that creates something powerful that will last for decades to come.
TE: Just as Nigeria’s digital economy is growing fast, so is fraud and impersonation. From your perspective, what are most platforms and users getting wrong about digital trust?
EA: Most platforms and users still treat trust as something you fix after something goes wrong.
What usually happens is this: teams rush to build the product, push growth, acquire users, and only when fraud starts to hurt do they “add” verification. But that approach is backwards. If trust isn’t part of the foundation from day one, you’re constantly patching holes instead of building something stable.
Users, on the other hand, are also getting something wrong. Many people completely outsource their judgment.
They see a blue tick, a badge, or a star rating and assume someone else has done the hard work of due diligence. The truth is, a lot of today’s verification is very shallow.
It may confirm that a phone number exists or that an email was clicked once, but it tells you nothing about behaviour, history, or risk.
It doesn’t tell you if this person has flagged before, or if they’re operating across multiple identities. And in an environment like Nigeria’s, where digital adoption is moving fast, that gap is dangerous.
What’s missing is intelligent, layered verification. Every user deserves clarity about the level they’re operating at. When people know what or who they’re dealing with, they make better decisions.
TE: Profiled describes itself as preventative, not reactive. Can you share a real example where Profiled helped prevent loss, harm, or reputational damage before it occurred?
EA: First, let me set the context. Profiled Nigeria was built on a very simple idea from criminology: people are not mainly deterred by how harsh punishment is, they’re deterred by how certain it is that they’ll get caught.
So our focus isn’t reacting after damage happens. Our focus is increasing the certainty of exposure early enough that the crime never feels worth attempting in the first place.
Now, let me give you a real example so this doesn’t stay theoretical.
One of our users, a small distributor in Lagos, was about to onboard a new supplier they met through social media. On the surface, it looked clean. CAC documents were shared. A bank account was provided. The conversations were smooth. Timelines were urgent. There was pressure to pay a mobilization fee.
Honestly, the usual performance. Before making any payment, the distributor ran the supplier through Profiled.
What followed wasn’t dramatic, but here’s the important part: nothing illegal had happened yet. The supplier was informed that payment would only proceed after full Profiled verification…then everything changed. The urgency disappeared. The follow-ups stopped. The supplier stopped responding altogether.
They didn’t argue. They didn’t negotiate. They just vanished. So the outcome was simple: No money lost. No dispute. No police report. No reputation damage control.
From a criminology standpoint, that’s exactly how prevention works. Profiled didn’t punish anyone. We didn’t accuse anyone. We simply removed anonymity and made deception too risky to continue.
That’s what we mean when we say preventative. When people know they’re likely to be seen clearly, most bad intentions quietly exit the room.
That’s why Profiled is preventative. Reactive systems wait for damage, then argue about refunds, liability, and regret. Preventative systems change behaviour upstream by signaling accountability early. Criminals do not fear punishment. They fear visibility.
Profiled operationalizes that fear, quietly, before anyone gets hurt. Which, frankly, is far less exciting than scandals and losses, but much better for business continuity, trust capital, and sleep.
TE: What does “verification as infrastructure” mean in practical terms? Explain Profiled to someone outside tech.
EA: I usually explain it with something very simple, ROADS. When you drive from one place to another, you don’t stop every time to ask if the road is safe. You trust that there are standards, rules, inspections, and maintenance behind it. That’s what infrastructure does in making everyday activity possible.
Online, we don’t have that yet. Every time you meet someone new on the internet, whether it’s a vendor, a freelancer, a partner, you’re forced to start from scratch. You check reviews, ask around, stalk profiles, and still end up hoping for the best. It’s tiring, inconsistent, and it doesn’t really scale.
What Profiled Nigeria is doing is building that missing trust infrastructure.
So when you interact with someone verified through Profiled Nigeria, you’re not just seeing “this ID was uploaded once.” You’re seeing a fuller picture, business records where they exist, behavioural patterns, how consistently that identity shows up across platforms, and for higher-risk interactions, even physical verification.
The real change is the starting point. Instead of beginning with “I have no idea who this person is,” you begin with “Here’s what we know, and here’s what we don’t.” That alone changes how people make decisions.
And when that baseline improves, businesses grow faster, individuals transact with more confidence, and platforms can scale without becoming breeding grounds for fraud. That’s what verification as infrastructure means in practical terms.
TE: How does your multi-layer approach of combining data intelligence, technology, and human review reduce blind trust without slowing users down?
EA: We’re very intentional about not slowing people down. The way we do that is by letting technology and humans do what each of them is best at.
Most checks happen in parallel across different data points, not one after the other. In the majority of cases, everything lines up quickly and the result is clear, so users get answers almost immediately without anyone needing to step in.
Where things don’t align, that’s when human review matters. But our team isn’t starting from scratch, they’re looking at already-analysed profiles with specific issues flagged. That makes the review focused and fast, not manual and exhausting.
The goal isn’t to remove trust. It’s to remove blind trust. We give people enough clarity to act confidently, sometimes that means “you’re good to proceed,” and sometimes it means “pause and look closer.” Either way, you’re making a decision, not a guess.
TE: SecureMeet and vendor verification speak to everyday risks Nigerians face. Why was it important for Profiled to address both digital and physical interactions?
EA: Because digital actions often lead to physical consequences. So separating “digital” risk from “physical” risk is artificial. It’s all the same trust problem.
SecureMeet focuses on one of the most dangerous moments, a moment where not just trust is required but safety as well. The transition from chatting online to meeting in person. That’s where information is most uneven, and where people are most vulnerable.
Vendor verification addresses the business side. In our informal economy, people are making serious financial commitments to vendors they barely know, often with little documentation to rely on.
We built both because trust infrastructure has to cover the full journey. And honestly, because reach matters. Not everyone is doing large corporate deals, but almost everyone is meeting strangers online or buying from unknown vendors. If we only focused on enterprise, we’d be solving a small part of a much bigger problem.
TE: Verification and security are crowded fields globally. What makes Profiled Nigeria fundamentally different?
EA: Three things: context, coverage, and commitment to prevention. First is context. Most global verification tools are built for countries with clean, centralised records and mostly formal employment. Nigeria doesn’t work like that. A large part of our economy is informal, and we built Profiled Nigeria for that reality. We understand that someone without a registered business can still be legitimate, and that a shiny website and fresh registration don’t automatically mean low risk.
Second is coverage. Many tools solve just one piece of the puzzle, KYC for fintech, background checks for hiring, or a one-time ID check. That’s not enough. Identity in Nigeria is layered.
Even something like a NIN doesn’t always reflect where someone actually lives or operates from. We look across individual identity, business legitimacy, behaviour over time, and even physical interaction safety.
And finally, prevention. A lot of companies call themselves verification platforms, but they’re really reacting after something goes wrong. Our focus is stopping harm before it happens. That requires a different way of thinking and a different kind of system.
We’re not a global company trying to adjust for Nigeria. We’re a Nigerian company solving Nigerian problems, with the goal of setting the standard for trust in emerging markets.
TE: How do you design trust signals that speak to Nigeria’s unique social and economic context, rather than copied from foreign models?
EA: You start by understanding what trust actually looks like here, not what it looks like in textbooks.
In many Western systems, trust is very institutional: credit scores, payroll records, formal employment history. In Nigeria, trust is more relational and network-based. People judge reliability by consistency, reputation, and patterns over time, not just paperwork.
So we design our signals around what actually predicts behaviour here. Things like how long someone has operated in the same physical location, whether they’ve used the same name and phone number across platforms for years.
We also pay close attention to context. For example, having more than one phone number isn’t unusual in Nigeria because of network issues. But there’s a clear difference between someone who has two stable lines and someone who’s used eight different numbers in three months under different names. Our system understands that difference.
TE: In informal markets and peer-to-peer spaces, trust is usually based on instinct. How does Profiled replace instinct with insight, without removing human judgment?
EA: We don’t replace instinct, we inform it.
Instinct is really just pattern recognition based on personal experience. The challenge is that any one person’s experience is limited. What we bring is a much wider lens, drawn from patterns across thousands of interactions.
You might meet someone who feels a bit off, but you can’t explain why. Profiled Nigeria helps put context around that feeling. Sometimes the data shows there’s no real risk and what you’re sensing is unfamiliarity. Other times, it surfaces clear warning signs and suddenly that instinct has evidence behind it.
We’re careful not to present this as instructions. We don’t say “trust” or “don’t trust.” We say, “Here’s what we know, here’s what’s unclear, and here’s what to pay attention to.” The decision always stays with the person.
TE: What has been the hardest leadership decision you’ve had to make while building Profiled, and what did it teach you?
EA: That’s an easy one. Painful, but easy. The hardest leadership decision I’ve had to make while building Profiled was realizing that not everyone who believes in the mission should be on the team. Some people believe in the idea. Fewer people can survive the discipline required to build it.
Early on, I made the classic mistake. I optimized for passion instead of execution. If someone sounded excited, aligned, and said all the right things about “changing the system,” I assumed we were good. We were not good.
At some point, I had to make the call to slow down momentum, have uncomfortable conversations, and let go of people who were good humans but wrong operators. That’s never fun. There’s no leadership manual that makes those conversations pleasant. You just sit there thinking, this is going to ruin my day and theirs.
What it taught me was simple and slightly annoying: leadership isn’t about being liked, it’s about being clear. Mission without standards turns into chaos. And clarity, even when it hurts, is a form of respect.
Building Profiled forced me to learn that protecting the integrity of the system matters more than protecting my own comfort. If we’re serious about trust, accountability, and prevention, then those values have to start internally, not just in the product.
So yes, letting people go slowed things down in the short term. But it’s also the reason Profiled can move forward without breaking itself. And I sleep better, which is an underrated leadership KPI.
TE: What is the single biggest threat to digital safety in Nigeria today that most people underestimate?
EA: Normalization of fraud. When people start expecting loss as part of digital life, the system has already failed.
Ten years ago, scams were easier to spot, poor grammar, obvious lies, crude tactics. Today, many of these operations are run like real businesses. They have polished websites, proper branding, customer-service scripts, and they study how people think and respond. Some even use AI to personalise their approach.
The problem is that they’re professionalising faster than platforms are securing. These networks share information, adapt quickly, and refine their methods. You see it in long-term romance scams, in emails that perfectly mimic real vendors, and in fake investment platforms that look more convincing than legitimate ones.
What makes this especially dangerous is that it’s often invisible until it’s too late. People believe they’re being cautious, but they’re using outdated defences against much more advanced threats.
If we don’t build trust infrastructure that matches the sophistication of today’s fraud, the gap will only continue to widen.
TE: What opportunities exist for startups that don’t treat trust as a feature, but as economic infrastructure?
EA: Massive ones because almost every growth sector in Nigeria is trust-constrained right now.
Trust unlocks commerce, collaboration, and growth. Digital lending is a perfect example. The limiting factor isn’t capital or demand, it’s knowing who to trust.
When you solve trust as infrastructure, you’re not just building a product, you’re removing a constraint on economic growth. The market size isn’t your direct revenue, it’s the total value of economic activity your infrastructure enables.
TE: Looking back on your journey, what keeps you anchored to this mission, what lessons would you approach differently if starting again, what advice would you give young innovators building technology for social impact, and what legacy do you hope to leave through your work and through Profiled?
EA: Interesting! That question sounds like four questions dressed up in one, but let’s do this properly.
- What keeps me anchored to the mission?
Honestly, it’s the cost of failure I’ve already seen. I’ve watched trust collapse in real time and take businesses, relationships, and confidence down with it. Once you see how one bad actor can set someone back years, you stop treating “digital risk” like a theoretical problem. This work stays personal because the consequences are very real, and they don’t announce themselves politely before they hit.
- What would I do differently if I were starting again?
I’d move slower at the beginning and be far more intentional about foundations. I underestimated how much energy it takes to unbuild bad assumptions. I’d also stop trying to explain the vision to everyone. Not everyone is your audience, and not everyone deserves a front-row seat while you’re still figuring things out.
- What is my advice to young innovators building for social impact?
Two things. First, stop confusing intention with impact. Wanting to help is not the same as helping. Measure outcomes, not applause. Second, build systems that work even when you’re tired, broke, or not in the room. If your solution only functions when you’re present, you didn’t build infrastructure, you built dependence.
- What is the legacy I hope to leave?
I want Profiled to normalize accountability. I want people to look back and say, “This is where blind trust started to feel irresponsible.” If the legacy is that fewer people lose money, fewer businesses stall out of fear, and verification becomes a default instead of an afterthought, I’ll take that win.
At the end of the day, I’m not trying to build a loud company. I’m trying to build one that quietly changes how people move through digital spaces with a little more confidence and a lot less regret.
TE: It was nice speaking to you.
EA: Thanks very much and appreciations to your team for the great work you do at Techeconomy.
