Evaluating Innovation at Scale: Inside the MTN MoMo

In a year dominated by conversations about digital wallets, instant transfers, and the rapid shift toward cashless systems, the MTN MoMo Hackathon 2023 in Lagos offered a more grounded perspective on Africa’s fintech trajectory: innovation must work not just in theory, but under the realities of poor connectivity, regulatory complexity, and diverse user capacities.

Held on Friday, October 27, 2023, at the Four Points by Sheraton, the Lagos edition brought together Nigeria’s strongest developer teams to present solutions built on the MoMo Open API (Application Programming Interface), which is MTN’s mobile-money platform that powers transactions for millions across the continent. While other countries would go on to host their own finals later in the year, Lagos was among the earliest showcases of how developers are reimagining financial access using interoperable, API-driven tools.

The competition’s thematic focus, “Innovative Financial and Transactional Applications,” reflected MTN’s broader ambition to address real gaps in financial inclusion. Developers were encouraged not only to design clever interfaces but also to solve the everyday constraints Nigerians face when sending, receiving, and managing money. Many tools centered on offline payments, merchant transactions, healthcare financing, or savings automation, each shaped by the MoMo API stack’s capabilities.

The judging panel reflected the event’s practical orientation. It included Chioma Nwahiri, Head of Go-To-Market and Customer Acquisition at MoMo PSB (Payment Service Bank), whose expertise in digital-payments growth strategies provided insight into product viability and user accessibility. Adejumoke Abolade, Corporate Accounts Partner at MoMo PSB, contributed a perspective rooted in enterprise partnerships and financial-services integration. Alongside these MTN representatives sat Paschaline Ugwo, an independent product manager known in Nigeria’s fintech sector for her work on high-volume payment systems and API-driven (Application Programming Interface-driven) infrastructure. Her background at Remita, where she helped develop large-scale disbursement systems, and at VFD Group, where she worked on digital banking and SME (Small and Medium-sized Enterprises)-focused tools, gave her a vantage point grounded in both architecture and deployment.

Paschaline Ugwo’s presence proved particularly significant. Hackathon judging is often associated with surface-level pitch reviews, but she pushed the evaluations into more technical territory. Throughout the live demos, she challenged teams to justify their architectural decisions, stress-test API behavior under load, and consider the failure patterns that real users encounter, from dropped USSD sessions to inconsistent network coverage to authentication breakdowns on low-end devices.

“We weren’t simply scoring prototypes,” she noted after the event. “We were asking whether these solutions could survive the realities of enterprise-scale deployment, compliance, resilience, and user safety included.”
This emphasis on durability shaped the outcome. The winning entry, Rova Pay, developed by Oluwapelumi Yusuf, distinguished itself by addressing one of Nigeria’s most persistent payment challenges: how to make transactions possible when internet access is unreliable or unavailable. Rova Pay uses MoMo APIs to automate USSD transactions, allowing users to complete payments without manually entering codes or relying on data. For markets where feature phones remain common and broadband penetration is uneven, this approach carries both technical and social weight.
Runner-up solutions tackled related problems such as healthcare payments and user incentives for mobile-money adoption. Yet across all teams, the feedback from the judges proved as influential as the final rankings. Several finalists described the exchange as unusually rigorous for a hackathon, noting that the line of questioning felt closer to a systems review than a pitch contest. One developer remarked that Paschaline Ugwo’s guidance “changed how I think about product validation,” forcing a reconsideration of how to design for failure, not just ideal conditions.

Taken together, the Lagos edition of the MTN MoMo Hackathon showed a fintech ecosystem maturing beyond the pursuit of novelty. It highlighted an industry increasingly conscious that innovation must scale, secure, and endure. In such an environment, judges are not symbolic figures; they are gatekeepers, ensuring that the solutions elevated to the next stage are not only imaginative but capable of operating on the infrastructure that millions rely on.

In that process, experts like Paschaline Ugwo play a quiet but consequential role. By blending real-world implementation experience with disciplined scrutiny, she helps steer the ecosystem toward products that can genuinely advance financial inclusion. As Nigeria continues to push the boundaries of digital finance, that combination of creativity and technical accountability may become one of its greatest competitive advantages.