Abolore Salami is a Nigerian entrepreneur and infrastructure-focused fintech founder whose work has helped redefine how financial inclusion is approached in Africa. He is the founder of Riby Finance, a digital financial services platform built for cooperatives, families, credit unions, and development-finance programs, an area long overlooked by mainstream fintech innovation despite its deep roots across the continent.
Through Riby’s proprietary products and large-scale public- and private-sector partnerships, Salami has supported the onboarding of millions of individuals and families into formal financial systems, working with institutions such as the Bank of Industry (BOI), Nigerian Export Promotion Council (NEPC), Sterling Bank, Mercy Corp, state governments, and international development organisations like the International Labour Organization (ILO). His approach prioritises transparency, governance, and long-term infrastructure over short-term consumer growth.
In this interview, Salami shares his perspective on financial inclusion in Africa, the role fintechs must play beyond consumer banking, and why cooperative finance offers critical lessons for innovators seeking sustainable impact. Excerpts.
Financial inclusion has become a recurring theme in Africa’s fintech narrative. From your perspective, what does true financial inclusion really mean?
Abolore Salami: True financial inclusion goes far beyond opening accounts or onboarding users onto apps. Inclusion means relevance, usability, and continuity. People must be able to use financial services consistently, confidently, and in ways that align with how they already live and earn.
If a product is technically accessible but culturally misaligned or operationally fragile, it is not inclusive.
In Africa, inclusion also means resilience. Many people experience income volatility, communal financial obligations, and limited safety nets. Financial products must reflect those realities.
Inclusion is achieved when people can save, borrow, and invest in a way that strengthens their financial lives over time, not just when they can download an app. That distinction is often lost in conversations that focus only on access and scale.
Despite the growth of fintechs across the continent, millions of Africans remain unbanked or underbanked. Why has inclusion been so difficult to achieve?
Salami: One major reason is that many fintech solutions are built with assumptions imported from other markets. Products are designed for individuals with predictable income, high digital literacy/access, and formal employment. That excludes a large segment of Africans by default.
Another issue is trust. Financial inclusion is not just a technical problem; it is a social one. People are cautious about new financial systems, especially when previous experiences with institutions have been disappointing.
Finally, there is the challenge of sustainability. Some fintechs prioritise growth metrics over long-term value, which leads to products that struggle once funding tightens.
Inclusion requires patience, local understanding, and systems designed to endure, not just scale quickly.
What role should fintech companies realistically play in closing Africa’s financial inclusion gap?
Salami: Fintechs should see themselves as infrastructure builders, not just product creators. Their role is to reduce friction, improve transparency, and lower the cost of delivering financial services. But they cannot replace social structures that already exist.
The most effective fintechs complement existing financial behaviour rather than trying to overwrite it. That means partnering with communities, institutions, and informal systems that people already trust. Cooperative and Agency Banking models deeply respect and recognize this trust.
Fintechs also need to accept their limits. Technology can enable inclusion, but it cannot force adoption or trust. Those are earned over time through reliability, clarity, and respect for local realities.
Many fintech products focus on individuals. Why do you believe group-based and community finance models are critical to inclusion in Africa?
Salami: Because finance in Africa is often communal. People save, lend, and invest collectively through cooperatives, associations, and informal groups. These systems work because they are rooted in social accountability and shared goals. Family-level banking is also something we are looking into deeply, treating families as a group/unit.
Individual-focused fintechs often struggle to replicate that trust digitally. Group-based models already solve many behavioural challenges such as discipline, repayment, and long-term commitment. Ignoring them means ignoring how millions of people already manage money.
If fintechs want to drive inclusion, they must understand and support these collective and household systems rather than viewing them as outdated or informal.
Cooperatives and informal financial groups have existed for decades. Why do you think they’ve been largely overlooked by modern fintechs?
Salami: Partly because they appear complex. Cooperatives involve governance, shared decision-making, and internal rules that don’t fit neatly into simple app logic. Many fintechs prefer straightforward individual products because they’re easier to design and scale, which is understandable and has its merits.
There’s also a perception issue. Informal systems are sometimes viewed as unsophisticated, even though they manage significant volumes of money.
In reality, cooperatives are highly structured social institutions. What they lack is modern digital infrastructure. Overlooking them is not just a missed opportunity, but a misunderstanding of where trust and financial activity already exist.
In more advanced markets, you find cooperatives and credit-unions already delivering huge amounts of value in billions of dollars yearly to their members, an example being the Navy Federal Credit Union in the United States with over 12 millions members and very advanced digital banking solutions comparable to any commercial bank.
Drawing from your experience across consulting, power technology, and financial services, what did you learn about how Africans actually organise money?
Salami: I learned that financial behaviour is deeply contextual. People organise money around relationships, obligations, and long-term goals, not just convenience.
In consulting and power technology, I saw how infrastructure must adapt to real-world conditions—unreliable networks, regulatory complexity, and diverse users. These experiences reinforced the idea that technology must serve behaviour, not the other way around.
Financial products succeed when they fit into existing economic and social patterns. That understanding shaped my approach to fintech and ultimately influenced how I thought about inclusion and scale.
How did these insights influence your decision to build Riby as a platform focused on cooperatives and group-based finance?
Salami: Riby was born from the recognition that cooperatives already do much of what fintechs aim to achieve, mobilising savings, providing credit, and enforcing discipline, but lack digital tools. Instead of reinventing finance, we chose to start there, digitise what already works and advance from the base.
The platform was designed to support transparency, governance, and accountability within groups. That focus allowed us to penetrate a segment many fintechs ignored, not because it was niche, but because it was misunderstood.
Riby is a response to structural realities, not a trend-driven product. Groups, communities and families are important user categories beyond just individual users and we deeply apply this thinking to our approach to new product development and our global growth plans.
What were the key challenges in digitising cooperative finance, particularly around trust and adoption?
Salami: Trust was central. Cooperatives are cautious because they manage collective funds. Any digital solution must enhance transparency, not obscure it. We had to ensure that records were clear, auditable, and accessible to members.
Adoption also required patience. Digitisation is a behavioural shift, not just a technical one. Grass root agent networks were critical and we onboarded thousands of agents across over 20 states.
Training, education, and gradual onboarding were essential. We learned that technology must adapt to users’ pace, not force change abruptly.
That approach helped build confidence and long-term usage. Strong partnerships with banks and development finance institutions (DFIs) were also vital in our development.
How can fintechs balance innovation, regulation, and sustainability while serving underserved communities?
Salami: By treating regulation as part of the design process, not an obstacle. Financial services demand trust, and regulation exists to protect that trust. Sustainable fintechs embed compliance into their architecture from the beginning.
Innovation should focus on simplifying complexity for users, not bypassing safeguards. When fintechs align innovation with regulatory intent and long-term value creation, sustainability follows naturally.
Cutting corners may accelerate short-term growth, but it undermines credibility over time.
Looking ahead, what must change for Africa’s fintech ecosystem to deliver lasting inclusion rather than short-lived success?
Salami: The ecosystem needs to shift from growth-first thinking to impact-first thinking. Scale matters, but durability matters more. Fintechs must build products that can survive economic cycles, not just funding cycles.
There also needs to be greater respect for indigenous financial systems.
Cooperatives, associations, and community finance are not relics; they are assets. The future of inclusion lies in blending technology with these systems thoughtfully. If fintechs embrace that mindset, Africa’s financial inclusion story will be far more enduring.
