Beyond growth: How Kora’s CFO thinks about building a profitable fintech

From managing infrastructure costs to building profitable business models, Ayodeji Osisami explains why sustainability, efficiency, and disciplined growth are becoming the real tests for African fintech companies.

There’s an image of fintech success that may seem impressive and convincing from the outside, with rising transaction volumes, new market entries, and frequent announcements of expansion. However, beneath that surface, many businesses are facing a different reality: high activity, slim profit margins, and, in some cases, a lack of a clear path to profitability.

For Ayodeji Osisami, Chief Financial Officer at Kora, that gap is where most fintech conversations fall short. 

Growth, in his view, is not the problem. The real challenge is building a business that can sustain that growth without depending on constant capital injections or operating on margins that quietly erode over time.

From computer engineering to finance leadership

Ayodeji Osisami’s introduction to technology wasn’t dramatic. There was no singular breakthrough moment or early startup experiment. Instead, it was curiosity built gradually, through teenage interactions with computers running on command prompts and systems like Microsoft DOS.

That curiosity led him to study computer engineering at Covenant University. At the time, the goal was simply to understand how computers worked and explore what could be built with them.

By the time Osisami was rounding off university, it had become clear that engineering wouldn’t be his long-term path. What stood out to him wasn’t building systems, but understanding how businesses worked, how they grew, how they made money, and, more importantly, how they sustained it.

“I realised I had more affinity towards finance and business,” he says.

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