When BitSika, one of Africa’s most promising fintech startups, set its sights on expanding into Francophone Africa, it needed more than just marketing muscle; it needed someone who understood how people felt about money.
That’s where Sinet Akih, a young product marketing manager from Bamenda, Cameroon, came in.
At the time, BitSika was already a rising star. Backed by Binance Labs, the cross-border payment app was simplifying how Africans send, receive, and spend money.
By 2020, BitSika had processed nearly $40 million across 269,000 transactions, serving over 95,000 users across the continent. Yet, for many Francophone users, the platform still felt foreign, too technical, and too distant.
Sinet saw that gap not as a barrier but as an opportunity.
“Fintech isn’t just about features,” he says. “It’s about trust, and trust is built in language, tone, and experience.”
When he joined BitSika in 2023, his first move wasn’t to push ads or promos. Instead, he spent weeks engaging users directly, studying how they interacted with the app, what confused them, and why some stopped using it after a few transactions.
His findings helped the team redesign onboarding flows, localize communications in both English and French, and introduce simplified in-app education around digital payments and compliance.
The results were immediate. In just six weeks, BitSika’s user growth in Cameroon spiked by 25%, primarily driven by influencer campaigns and relatable digital storytelling.
Sinet’s team leveraged humor, culture, and peer-driven content to make financial technology feel human. BitSika wasn’t just an app anymore, it became part of the digital identity of young Cameroonians.
“He didn’t market BitSika like a fintech,” one former colleague recalls. “He marketed it like a movement, something that belonged to the people using it.”
Sinet’s work also helped BitSika navigate a more complex challenge: building trust in regions where cryptocurrency was often misunderstood.
By tailoring the app’s education layer to reflect how virtual Visa cards worked and how remittances were tracked, he helped demystify fintech for first-time users while aligning BitSika’s brand with financial inclusion.
Beyond marketing, Sinet immersed himself in product strategy. He worked closely with engineers to adapt the UX for bilingual audiences, helped set KPIs for acquisition and retention, and introduced growth experiments to test new user segments across Central Africa.
His approach was intensely data-driven yet grounded in empathy, which set him apart in a space where numbers often overshadow narratives.
“Every click tells a story,” he says. “If you listen long enough, you’ll know what people need, not just what they want.”
By late 2023, Sinet had become BitSika’s bridge to Cameroon’s growing fintech community. Through university workshops, Twitter AMAs, and partnerships with local creators, he built the brand’s grassroots credibility, making the app a familiar name among freelancers, students, and small business owners.
It was an unlikely journey for a young innovator who started by borrowing laptops in Bamenda during the height of the region’s crisis.
But it’s that background growing up in uncertainty and learning to build from scarcity that shaped his understanding of what technology should do: serve people first.
Before BitSika, he worked on product and growth initiatives at CheckMe, a digital health startup, where he helped refine product-market fit and launch strategies.
These roles laid the foundation for his ability to connect technology with human behaviour, a skill that would later define his work in fintech.
After BitSika, Sinet applied the same philosophy to other ventures, including his startup, Jappcare Autotech, which aims to improve road safety through digital maintenance tools.
But his time at BitSika remains a defining chapter, one that taught him how robust design, storytelling, and data can be when combined with purpose.
Looking back, he says BitSika wasn’t just about moving money. “It was about moving confidence, showing people that African technology could be safe, simple, and built for them.”
In a fintech world driven by numbers, Sinet Akih stands out for bringing something less measurable but far more enduring: connection.
And in the story of BitSika’s rise across Cameroon and Francophone Africa, his fingerprints are quietly but unmistakably there.
