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For most of the 2000s, Nigerians who wanted to send money had two choices: carry cash across the country or queue at a bank that many of them did not use. Tayo Oviosu saw that gap while working in Silicon Valley and then in Lagos, and he decided to build a company around it. That company, Paga, now processes trillions of naira for millions of customers, and it keeps expanding into lending, cross-border payments and new technologies. This biography covers his age, education, career and the thinking behind a business built for everyday people.
Who Is Tayo Oviosu?
Eyitayo “Tayo” David Oviosu is a Nigerian-American entrepreneur and the founder and Group CEO of Paga, a digital payments company that lets Africans send, pay and bank through their phones. He founded Paga in 2009 and has led it ever since. He also co-founded Kairos Angels, an angel investment club, and he is an Endeavor Outlier Entrepreneur and an Unreasonable Fellow.
Tayo Oviosu’s Age and Early Life
Oviosu was born in Lagos in 1977 and is 49 years old. He grew up in Lagos and moved to the United States in 1994, at 16. The move put him in a very different economy and gave him a view of Nigeria from outside, an advantage he later put to use.
Tayo Oviosu’s Education
Oviosu earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering, with cum laude honours, from the University of Southern California in 1998. He then earned a Master of Business Administration from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business in 2005. The engineering degree gave him technical fluency, and the Stanford MBA gave him the strategy and finance tools to build and fund a company.
A Rough Start in Los Angeles
Oviosu’s career did not begin smoothly. His first job after university was as a semiconductor chip designer at a small company in Los Angeles. He has said he performed badly and lost the job after three months. He then worked in a mail room and a call centre to pay his bills, took a job as a software engineer and later worked as a database administrator.
Oviosu has told the story with humour. Many years later, he called his former boss to thank him, because losing that job led him to Stanford and everything that followed.
Deloitte and Cisco
In 1999, Oviosu joined Deloitte Consulting, where he led technical implementation teams. After his MBA, he joined Cisco Systems in San Jose as Manager of Corporate Development. There he handled strategy, acquisitions and private equity investments across four technology sectors: virtual computing, application networking, security and network management. He also helped lead Cisco’s investment expansion in Africa.
Cisco gave him two lasting lessons. He learned how large technology companies decide which startups to buy or back, and he gained a firsthand view of what investors look for in a founder.
Returning to Nigeria
Oviosu moved back to Nigeria and joined Travant Capital Partners, a West African private equity fund, as Vice President. He stayed for about six months. In that time he met entrepreneurs, studied local businesses and concluded that the biggest opportunity lay in financial access, not in investing in someone else’s company.
Founding Paga
In 2009, Oviosu founded Paga to enable universal access to financial services for Nigerians. He started with savings and a lean team, and his goal was simple: reduce the use of cash and make it easy for people to move money with a basic phone.
Paga built a network of agents, ordinary people in shops and kiosks who help customers deposit and withdraw cash. That design suited a country where many people live far from a bank branch. Over time, the company added bill payments, airtime top-ups, merchant payments and savings.
Scale and Growth
The numbers show how large the business has become. Paga says it has processed more than $55 billion in transactions since launch, and it handled ₦17.1 trillion in 2025, a 96% increase over the previous year. The company has raised $45 million to date.
It has also expanded its reach. Paga entered the United States banking market through a partnership with Regent Bank and became a local partner for PayPal in Nigeria. Awards followed: CNBC named Oviosu its Entrepreneur of the Year for West Africa in 2014, and the African Leadership Network named Paga its Outstanding Growing Company of the Year in Africa in 2015. Paga has ranked among the Financial Times’ fastest-growing companies in two consecutive years, and it appeared on the Fintech 250 list of promising fintechs three times, most recently in 2022.
Serving Everyday Nigerians
The thread running through Oviosu’s work is practical inclusion. Most large fintechs start with customers who already own smartphones and bank accounts. Paga started with people who did not, and it built its agent network and simple products around them. A trader who cannot reach a bank can still deposit cash with an agent, pay a supplier and receive money from relatives. The company’s approach treats financial services as a daily tool, not a special occasion.
That focus also shapes new products. Paga’s expansion into lending, led now by his co-founder, applies the same logic. Customers with a payment history can access small loans that traditional banks would not offer them.
Act 2: The April 2026 Restructuring
On April 7, 2026, Paga announced a leadership restructuring that it called Act 2. Oviosu became Group CEO and chairman of both the Group Board and the Paga Nigeria board. He plans to concentrate on new markets and on Paga Labs, with investments in stablecoins, crypto and artificial intelligence. Opeyemi Oyinloye became Group Chief Operating Officer and CEO of Paga Nigeria, and co-founder Jay Alabraba became Group Director of Special Projects, starting with lending.
The move splits strategy from daily execution. It lets Oviosu look further ahead, while Oyinloye runs the core business that pays for the experiments.
Family and Personal Life
Oviosu is married to Affiong Williams, the founder and CEO of Reel Fruit, a Nigerian company that processes and distributes locally grown fruit. Both are entrepreneurs, and both have spoken about building businesses in Nigeria.
Why Tayo Oviosu Is Trending Now
His name draws interest because of Paga’s restructuring, the company’s record growth and its plans to expand into new technologies and markets. Readers search for him to learn who built one of Nigeria’s best-known payments companies and where he plans to take it next.
What His Journey Teaches
Three lessons stand out. First, setbacks can redirect a career. Losing his first job sent him toward Stanford, and a short stint in private equity convinced him to build his own company. Second, an outsider’s view helps. Years in California and a role at Cisco gave him perspective on both Silicon Valley practices and Nigerian gaps. Third, build for people who are ignored. Paga grew because it served customers that banks overlooked, using agents and simple tools that fit their lives.
