Poker-faced Verto founder bets on money transfers

Ola Oyetayo threw in his safe and secure accountant’s job in the City of London to take a chance on the risky and expensive business of transferring money back home to Africa. At last, a lightbulb moment with a difference. You’ve all heard how hundreds of entrepreneurs had their epiphanies in gyms, coffee shops and their mother’s back garden; then they grabbed a pen and paper to sketch out the business that would make their fortune.

By contrast, Ola Oyetayo says his fast-growing money transfer business emerged from a late-night poker game.

It was over the turn of the cards that Oyetayo met his countryman and co-founder of Verto – Anthony Oduu – a former analyst who had worked in the capital markets with Barclays, Lloyds, Merrill Lynch and Bank of America. They pitted their wits against each other in poker nights every fortnight.

“People say I don’t bluff. I have a very straight face,” says Oyetayo.

“Don’t tell him this, but I think you can read Anthony very well because he can be quite impulsive. I have a stern, serious face, so you really don’t know what I’m doing. I think I have a straight poker face.”

This straight face also took in the money grumbles of the well-heeled poker school. All were expatriate Nigerians plying their trade in finance in the City of London. All complained about the cost and trouble of sending money home to Africa.

Skilled Nigerians working in London are legion. In 2021, research company Statista put the number of Nigerians living in London alone at 142,000. In the bars of Nigeria you will hear London called ”Lagos North”. In the city on the Thames the suburb of Peckham has the nickname “Little Lagos”.

Behind their poker faces, Oyetayo and Oduu listened and thought. They decided to quit their lucrative jobs in the City and take a chance. Were they gambling, I ask. “I wouldn’t say that. I take calculated risks, as most entrepreneurs do. I think the concept of entrepreneurship is about risk-taking. You think of something and you dare to actually go off and try to deliver it. Most times, it doesn’t pay off. Sometimes it does. And in very rare instances, it pays off spectacularly. The only reason we’re all in the game is hoping for that spectacular payoff,” says Oyetayo.

With this in mind, the two set out to build a company – one which today employs 200 people and moves $250m a month in 22 countries in Africa from its London base. It has seven offices around the world.

Cashing in the chips

Along the way, Verto raised capital in two funding rounds: a 2019 seed round of $2m and a $10m Series A round in 2021. Iyin Aboyeji, one of the young entrepreneurs behind Flutterwave and Andela, is among Verto’s angel investors.

“It was literally just the two of us [Oyetayo and Oduu]. I think we were both lucky – we weren’t two kids and a garage. I had spent about ten years working in financial services, so I had a bit of a nest egg. Anthony did as well. We started off as two reasonable adults in a WeWork office. It was a two-man WeWork office back in the day, and that’s where we started. It was just the two of us doing everything,” he says.

“It was super scrappy. We didn’t really have anything in terms of a platform. Most of our early activities were conducted on WhatsApp. We had a bunch of customers, created a WhatsApp group, and were essentially running a currency exchange platform on WhatsApp! That’s how we started – virtual. Eventually, we transitioned what we were doing on WhatsApp into an actual tech platform, which is what it is now.”

Verto was born, in 2018, as a small frog in a very large pond where scores of lean and mean start-ups make fortunes. There are too many to count in a market where millions of Africans around the world are prepared either to pay hard currency to send hard currency home, or prepared to use tech to buy goods and services from small businesses on the ground. Of Verto’s business, 70% is with small enterprises in Africa that move cash the other way to buy services from overseas.

Nigerian-based start-up Flutterwave, which has more than a million customers, is by far the biggest fish in the pond. It was founded in 2016 and became a unicorn in double-quick time- with the help of a $170m Series C funding round in 2021. It is now valued at more than $3bn in a growing, lucrative, industry.

“We did some work on this recently. In terms of revenue, the market is about $5.5bn annually – this is across four or five African markets, focusing on cross-border trade that needs payments to be facilitated. I wouldn’t disclose our revenue, but we’re still a small piece of that. It’s a big market and underserved, with lots of upside. If you look at just Africa-China trade, that’s about $282bn annually. So the opportunity is massive when you factor in other trade corridors too,” says Oyetayo.

In the face of this competition for huge reward, Verto’s first job was to garner what Oyetayo says is the most precious commodity in the business.

“Trust. It had always been a business-to-business platform, helping businesses move money internationally. It’s hard for a business to trust a name they don’t know when you’re saying, ‘Hey, I’m going to help you move $20,000 to China,’ even though you don’t have a website or anything to prove your legitimacy. So, it was about building trust and delivering on our promises. That’s still true today. Even as a big company, we have to service our customers well and follow through on our promises to help them move funds across the world. That’s the core of what we do,” says Oyetayo.

“Then we got into Y Combinator, the famed Silicon Valley accelerator. The biggest lesson I learned from there was that everything has to start small, and you also need to do things that don’t scale. Doing things that aren’t fancy, or high-level, in the early days teaches you the basics.”

These fundamentals saw steady growth. In March 2019, Verto celebrated moving $5m-a-month, in total processed volume. That has reached $250m in June 2025, creating jobs along the way.

“It was just myself and Anthony for the first six months. The first year, we grew to six people. The year after, about 15. Then up to 30, then 50, then 70. In the last two years, we’ve added around 130 people. So there’s been good growth in both team and revenue.”

Like father, like son

Oyetayo was born and bred into an entrepreneurial home back in Lagos. His parents were involved in healthcare. His late father, Jimmy, owned pharmacies and his mother, Bosede, was a nurse. Oyetayo listened and learned from his parents as he studied economics before leaving for the UK, in 2005: there he trained as an accountant.

“My dad was also an entrepreneur. He built a chain of pharmacies that did well for a while but hit some tough times. So, I understand the entrepreneurial journey – trying to do something on your own. My mom, like many Nigerians, always had a side hustle. She sold clothes, had a grocery store – there was always something. So that is probably where I get my entrepreneurial traits,” he says.

Yet, it was not all plain sailing for Oyetayo and Verto. He admits there were times he contemplated throwing in the towel.

“Oh, yeah. Lots of times, in the first three or four years. We all get comfortable, especially if you’ve had a career where something comes in at the end of the month. It’s rare to do anything that causes the company to fail in a regular job. But running your own shop means you carry a lot of responsibility – people depending on you, making numbers, getting revenue in, raising funding, closing bank partnerships, getting customers. Sometimes you just wish you were clocking in and clocking out while someone else handled the stress,” he says with a smile.

“But then something happens to keep you believing in the dream – like closing a new customer, having a great conversation with someone who has a significant point, or getting encouragement from an investor who sees your potential. Talking to other entrepreneurs who’ve been through similar struggles helps too. All that helps you get through it.”

Currency challenges

You need belief in abundance to get over the greatest hurdles facing the business including regulation and a dearth of foreign currency.

“It’s hard to convert local currency into foreign ones for payments. Capital controls also cause liquidity challenges – often there’s not enough foreign currency supply. That’s our biggest issue right now” he says.

Verto deals in 50 currencies from the Nigerian naira to the Kenyan shilling. It tries to alleviate currency problems with tech and products aimed at helping small businesses, like its multi-currency wallet. Oyetayo says traditional banks often involve multiple intermediaries and lengthy processing times, driving up transaction costs, delaying payments, and slowing down business.

The answer, on the currency front, he says, would be fewer currencies. I ask Oyetayo if he thinks it will happen. “No, I don’t think so – for a lot of reasons. But we do have successful single currencies in Africa, like the francophone countries using the CFA [Communauté Financière Africaine franc]. Outside of the Euro, there haven’t been many successful single currency cases in the world. So the CFA zone [which comprises the West African CFA franc and the Central African CFA franc] is actually something to be proud of. There was talk of ECOWAS [the Economic Community of West African States] launching a single currency too, but I’m not sure how that’s going. Even if we don’t have a pan-African currency, having successful regional ones is a win,” he says.

Oyetayo is cautious but a little more optimistic about the fledgling single market for the continent, the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), launched in 2021 and battling to gain momentum.

“Yes, goods and services can move, but can I go to Rwanda or Angola on a Nigerian passport easily? Connectivity is another issue – can I fly directly from South Africa to the DRC? So many moving parts make implementation hard. But if technocrats are committed, the frictions are surmountable. It’s a solid concept on paper, but we’re falling short in implementation.”

The current layers of regulation are also a bugbear for the money transfer business.

“We’d love to be in every African market. Egypt, for example, is hard to enter due to regulatory requirements. You have to respect every country’s sovereignty. Payment systems tie into balance of payments and currency reserves. Each central bank wants control over their own currencies. So regulation is a significant challenge.”

It can take companies like Verto up to three years to navigate the regulations of just one country.

“We’re a venture-backed business. We’ve raised institutional capital precisely because this is a big problem to solve. Part of that capital goes toward securing regulatory permission – paying consultants, legal experts and so on. It depends on the regulatory framework. Once we enter, we need to get boots on the ground, acquire customers, build a brand, and earn trust before we scale. But that process also creates a moat; not everyone can just launch in 20 countries overnight,” he says.

Verto and Oyetayo are optimistic about the future and have expansive plans.

“We’re planning to expand into North Africa. The nature of what we do means we need regulatory permission in most countries. We are working on Egypt – it’s a large market but has capital controls we need to navigate. We’re also doing more work in the francophone region,” he says.

“All things being equal, in five years’ time, we’ll be the primary non-bank financial institution for cross-border payments in and out of Africa.”

A bold prediction. Oyetayo may not have much time to play poker in the evenings these days, as he has two small children. Yet, clearly, he still likes to bet on his future.