Women steering Africa’s Fintech future: Meet the product minds behind platforms

Stories of bold founders, aggressive fundraising rounds, and market disruption have long dominated fintech in Africa. But beneath the surface of these headline, grabbing narratives are the builders – the product managers who transform vision into execution.

Among them is Paschaline Ugwo, a name that keeps emerging in conversations about infrastructure, scale, and inclusion – and for good reason.

As a product manager at Remita, Paschaline has quietly but decisively shaped how millions of Nigerians interact with digital financial services. Her work touches some of the country’s most complex and high-volume systems: bulk payments, POS terminal management, card processing, and embedded finance. Yet, her presence in the industry has often been understated, partly due to her preference for substance over spotlight.

“She’s a system thinker,” said Adaora Izuogu, a fintech researcher and founder of Women in Payments Africa. “While many are focused on user acquisition or UI tweaks, Paschaline asks: What are the rails? What are the dependencies? Can this scale in a real-world Nigerian context?”
This year, she served as a judge at the TechWomen Lagos Summit, evaluating early-stage products led by women founders. One such product, a savings tool for women in the market, had just entered beta testing.

“Paschaline asked the toughest but most useful questions,” said one of the participants. “She forced us to think beyond the interface and consider long-term viability, compliance, and integration challenges.”
Her involvement in such platforms is not performative. It reflects a genuine commitment to lifting others while building systems that work.

At the Innovate Lagos Hackathon, Ugwo was again tapped to judge entries tackling smart city problems- from transport payments to digital ID verification. Her feedback helped shape the winning team’s final prototype, which is now piloted in partnership with a local government council.

Yet for all her professional acclaim, Paschaline is most admired for her grounding in reality. She speaks often about the responsibility of building products in a country where infrastructural gaps, financial illiteracy, and trust deficits are not abstract problems – they are everyday barriers. “The default assumption in product development is often a frictionless world,” she said during a recent TechCabal live panel. “But Africa is not frictionless. Our job is to design with that friction in mind, not around it.”

Her colleagues describe her as a rare bridge between business, technology, and human insight. “Paschaline is the kind of product manager who doesn’t just ask what users want—she understands why they want it, and how the system needs to evolve to support it,” said one Remita executive.

In an industry still grappling with gender imbalance, her rise is also a quiet challenge to the status quo. She’s not just a woman in fintech—she’s a strategist, a builder, and a mentor shaping the fintech stack of tomorrow. Her journey signals a shift from personality-driven disruption to infrastructure-driven innovation.

As the fintech boom matures, the spotlight is slowly widening, making room for the product minds behind the platforms. Paschaline Ugwo, with her clarity of purpose and obsession with scale, is one of the brightest in that space. And her impact is just beginning to show.