What happens when you take a trust-based, offline financial system and turn it into software that people depend on with their money? In this episode, Erioluwa shares the real pressure behind building a fintech startup in Nigeria, where every product decision, line of code, and feature trade-off directly impacts user trust and financial safety.

For startup founders, this conversation goes beyond fintech. It reveals what it actually takes to move users from familiar, manual systems into digital products, how to balance growth with risk, and why sometimes the best product decision is not building a feature at all. From early traction challenges to scaling a lean engineering team, this episode breaks down the realities of building something people rely on financially, not just functionally.

You’ll also hear how trust becomes the real product, why simplifying solutions often beats complex engineering, and what changes when your users’ money, not just their attention, is on the line.

Key Takeaways

1. Why fintech changes engineering standards completely and why “good enough” code is never acceptable
2. How to balance product growth with fraud prevention and system risk
3. A practical approach to deciding which features to build or reject based on risk vs return
4. How to scale a lean engineering team without introducing unnecessary process overhead
5. Why raising the bar for users can be more effective than building complex safeguards
6. The shift from writing code to leading people, making trade-offs, and owning outcomes

About Erioluwa

Erioluwa Asiru is a software engineer, technology leader, and mentor, serving as CTO and Cofounder of Circle Funds. She leads the company’s technical vision, building scalable financial infrastructure and products that expand access to funding and wealth-building opportunities. Her work combines hands-on engineering with strategic leadership, ensuring reliable systems and strong product execution.

Alongside her role as a founder, Erioluwa is a lead mentor at Data Epic, where she guides cohorts through intensive six-month programs in data and software engineering. She is passionate about developing practical skills, fostering confidence, and helping aspiring professionals transition into successful tech careers.

Erioluwa has delivered a wide range of impactful solutions, including digital savings platforms, creator financing systems, admin portals, and automated data analysis tools. Driven by innovation, education, and economic empowerment, she is committed to building technology that creates real opportunities while mentoring the next generation of tech talent.

Chapters

00:00 What is Ajo?

06:56 Ad

07:28 Working in Nigerian Financial Technology

13:35 Fraud, Features, and Leadership

22:51 Ad

23:03 Complicated Solutions and Inspiration

26:38 The Future of Circle Funds

29:46 Mentorship Experience

31:05 You Need a Community!

Where to find Erioluwa

1. Website: https://circlefunds.io
2. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/asiru-erioluwa/

Every time, every line of code is with the consciousness that someone could take advantage of a loophole right here. So there's a lot of pressure. You're trying to make sure that people aren't losing money while at the same time you aren't losing money. Mistakes, errors are different when it comes to regular apps. Compared to when it is on FinTech apps. You have to be very conscious of.

That. And you're the CTO.

So in the end, that responsibility lies on your shoulders to make sure that it's absolutely trustworthy. Like you said, every line of code has to be correct. Welcome to the CTO Compass podcast. I'm your host, Mark Wormgoor, tech strategist and executive coach. In every episode, we meet tech leaders from startup CTOs to enterprise CIOs to explore what it means to lead in tech today. They share their stories and their lessons so that you can navigate your own journey in tech. Let's dive into today's episode. If you're building a system that moves money, The real product isn't about the financials, it's about trust. The first time that a payout is late or that a balance looks maybe wrong or nobody can explain what happens, that trust all disappears. And today we're going to talk about that with Eri. She is the co-founder and engineering leader at Circle Funds. And it's a startup in Nigeria and they're digitizing I.O. And I.O. Is a traditional group saving system that's used quite a lot in Africa. And for years, it's just been done on paper and it's trust and coordination between people. And they're actually turning that into software, which I think is really cool.

So it's a ledger where basically it has to be correct. Everybody has to know what they put in and what they can expect. And of course, they can't fail. Welcome to the CTO Compass. And for people like me, I had no idea what I was at the beginning that didn't grow up with the system. Maybe can you tell me what it is and what it actually does and how it works?

All right. Thank you very much, Mark.

So, Ajo is a popular round-robin system of contribution here in Nigeria. Quite popular all over Africa.

So, and it's illegal in some countries, actually, but very legal in Nigeria. It's a round-robin system of contribution where, let's assume we have five friends coming together to create a savings group. .

Lower cycles so that's like a brief overview of what's a Yeah, people participate because it's a way to get money up front without a lot of interest of it.

Choice so and what's Yeah, what's the main benefit of the system? Why do people participate?

Because if you are contributing, it's friends. Like I mentioned earlier, it's a trust system, right?

So it's expected that most of the people coming together to form these groups are familiar with each other, they are friends with each other, they have a relationship in some kind of way. Most times they do businesses together.

So it's a way to get money up front. So at the end of the day, if I'm contributing $1,000 and I'm getting $5,000, it's as though I've gotten a loan of $4,000 and I can pay conveniently over a certain period of time till the cycle is completed.

Okay, that makes sense. So before we get into Circle Funds more and the background of the app a bit more, .

Okay, yes, so... I started in tech about seven years ago as a software, as a junior software engineer. And it's been growth all the way since then. But how did I start Circle Funds or how did I get interested in Circle Funds? The trust system of Azure is something I did with a couple of friends while I was in the university and of which two out of them we started Circle Funds together.

So it's something we did throughout the later years of our universities. If you had a big spending, have a big expenses coming up, it's something that can save you when it comes to that. And When we finished university, we just thought this is a nice thing to automate because it's kind of a manual process. It's heavily dependent on the admin. And at the end of the day, likely since they are friends, the admin is not making anything of it at the end of the day.

So it's like the admin collects the contribution, reaches out to people who are defaulting. Trying to make sure everybody contributes, makes calculations, and still sends this money out to the person who's due for the collection.

So we thought this would be a nice concept if we could automate this entire process, and that's how we started.

Okay, so it makes sense. You started the university and you build it up from there. What's it like doing a fintech startup in Nigeria today?

So what's, I mean, a lot of us and a lot of our listeners, they're in the West, either in North America or in Europe. What's it like doing a startup in Nigeria, especially in FinTech?

Yeah, so what it's like doing startup, it's one, I would say, Kind of specific to the circle funds we are building to the adjust system we are building, I'd say it is a system where you kind of find it's hard to kind of convince people sometimes to leave the traditional system they were making use of to switching but once they switch they get hooked at the end of the day right but it's just more like why would i want to move from using WhatsApp groups to switching to an application to manage it but by the time you get on board and you realize that everything is well automated for you get hooked at the end of the day and there is There's kind of a fraud problem. I don't think this is specific to only Nigerian fintech companies. I believe this is specific to every, tech company that's into finance. Every time, every line of code is with the consciousness that someone could take advantage of a loophole right here.

So there's a lot of pressure. There's a lot of pressure. You're trying to make sure that people aren't losing money while at the same time you aren't losing money.

So that's what it's like. They have to remember every time that Mistakes, errors are different when it comes to regular apps compared to when it is on fintech apps. You have to be very conscious of that.

And you're the CTO. So in the end, that responsibility lies on your shoulders to make sure that it's absolutely trustworthy.

Like I said, every line of code has to be correct. Before we jump back in, here is something that I've learned from over 30 years of working in technology. The hardest part of leadership, it's not the technology. And it's not even the people or the teams. It's often that you're added alone by yourself. There's no one in the room that fully gets what you're dealing with. There's no one that you can trust to discuss your decision with. If that sounds familiar, find me on LinkedIn. Mark Wormgoor, and tell me what's in your mind. There's no pitch, just a discussion with somebody who's sat in that chair as well. Let's get back to it. You started this like almost a simple app savings app out of college. That was quite a few years ago. And when did you realize... That it's actually a financial app and that it is so important that every line has to be correct.

I think it started out as that way. It started out as a fintech app.

So from the beginning, we've been collecting contributions and everything. But there isn't so much pressure.

At the end of the day, you start simple, right? So there isn't that much pressure. You need to make sure AppyPath is correct and regular fintech locals that could be taking advantage of like... Risk conditions, making sure you are putting all of those things into consideration, right? But then as you progress, you begin to see, now these are not loopholes that are necessarily we're taking advantage of, but you could see maybe in some configurations, maybe in some As time goes on, you see you have so many people that are using your platform. You have to be more conscious of places where you store some secrets and all of those things.

So with time, you start taking, even before any issue happens that causes you to want to take those steps, you just feel like, the system is growing faster. You can't keep doing this. Keep saving some things here. You need to move them to a server.

Location. And secrets, of course, I think for most software developments are really important.

I mean, we've seen way too many data stores just end up on the internet because somebody left a secret somewhere in their code on GitHub or somewhere else. What else do you do?

So what do you do different from maybe a normal app to make absolutely sure that every line of code is correct and secure?

There is KYC done on every user that is onboarded. As much as possible, the app is based on trust where people who know each other come to contribute. But we have other features that are not necessarily only for people who know each other.

So there's a feature we released called like towards the end of last year, which is community trips. Now we aren't, it's possible you want to contribute amounts that aren't just for you and the your friends, maybe someone from your friend group couldn't afford it, or you want to do less than what your friends are doing, right? You can come on board and submitting like a bank statement. We do a review of your bank statement and we can suggest people within the app will fall into like your finance brackets and we can group you together. Now, in this case, we are serving as the intermediary and we are serving as the guarantee for defaulters.

So If you are doing something like that, you need to make sure that you have loan history of some of these users and to make sure that you no, you have enough information about this as in case of defaulting. So yes, we have KYCs to make sure that we have enough information about this as in case they default. And you don't want to wait to the default, right? You want to get some issues before you even get there.

So you want to make sure that, okay, they have the capacity for these amounts they are claiming they want to do. So either they are salaried as they get pretty high scores, like a credit score system where you rate users before they can join a community trip.

That sounds, I don't know too much about the Nigerian financial system. I think in Europe and the US, there's all these established procedures for KYC, but for checking somebody's credit score, their credit history, their loan history.

I mean, in the Netherlands, we have an agency that just deals with registering everybody that has at one point filled their loan or failed to pay up on their loan. So I think it's easy to check. How different is that in Nigeria? How hard is that?

Yeah, so... We have the open banking system in Nigeria, but it's, I mean, the government approved it already, but it's still kind of a theory right now because we have a data issue here in Nigeria. But at the same time, we have bodies like CRCs that credit bureaus that makes this data available. You can get credit history of users. But the issue with this data comes at a cost, right? They come at a cost and sometimes you still have to reject these users at the end of the day.

So there's trade-off between trying to decide whether you want to pay this amount for this user, is this user going to generate enough revenue at the end of the day for you to spend such an amount on the user? So that's like, but there's a data problem. The data is not very open and readily available. Because of like, there's some licenses that makes it, causes you to not have this data available. Necessarily open directly to.

You. Because, I mean, if you build this between friends, I mean, friends trust each other and friends know each other. If you start in these open communities, I can imagine that that's just so much riskier to do.

So you only launched this last year then for the open communities. Is that what you said?

Yes.

Okay, so I was sorry, friends. And then with that, it must have been... Become a lot more difficult to do fraud protection or default protection. You can check up front, but I'm sure you've had defaults or you've had people not paying. How do you deal with those situations?

Well, you can't say a lot sometimes, but... Contrary to what people might think, the default rate is extremely low, surprisingly low, I would say, default rate. And I think it's because we made the bar for entry a little high.

So most times, like I mentioned, salary earners are more trusted for this situation. Maybe future releases will accommodate people who aren't, who have like an erratic inflow of funds. But once we notice a pattern of inflow, it makes it more trustworthy. And in a way, because you have information about like their location and to an extent where they work, it makes them feel like, they need to keep up with their payment and stuff like that.

So default rate, extremely low. So far, I would say we've not experienced any loss regarding that part. Good.

Really good news. So, and then when you start designing your app or releasing new features, I'm sure that every time you have to think, this is a cool new feature that I want to build. But it might open up for fraud or it might open up for abuse. How do you make decisions? What features you're going to build or.

Yeah, so I think I would say I'm a little biased in a way because when it comes to that, because being a co-founder and being a city, there's a trade-off between business, profit and business. Trying to protect the system, right?

So it's still about where you need. There are features that it's totally fine to embark on a feature and realize that, okay, we cannot make these entries so easy because we don't want to open ourselves up to fraud or even open other users up to fraud.

So, you just have to weigh the options. Is this going to be worth the profit or the income that comes from it? And the engineering power, the engineering time it's going to take into this. Is it going to be worth it? And think about it, consider the risk side of things.

So it's all about weighing it and weighing the.

Options. And you started this alone, right? Or at least you start with the three of you, but you were the sole tech founder. You've now built a team. What does your team look like? How many engineers do you have, full-time, part-time?

So right now we have about six engineers full time. It's a It's quite a lean team.

I mean, there are other people on other teams, but speaking of the engineering team, there's about six engineers. And sometimes we have a consultation. People come in and go maybe to review your security setup and things like that. We have like technical advisors sometimes too.

Sometimes you want to take an approach to solving a problem. It's interesting that there's no problem you think you're facing, especially when it relates to H, for engineering we have about six of the engineers are scientists.

So, and how did you, as you started this out of university? How did you learn about building a team, growing a team? How did that team grow? Was it a... It must have been a difficult process. What did it look like going from Yeah, I'm just graduating university to leading a team of six now.

Yeah, so it's... First, the other co-founders, we have engineering backgrounds.

So that's made it easier. So it started with myself and the other co-founders building together. Both engineers, both co-founders are off development right now. But when we started building together It's like sometimes you're not conscious when the growth actually happens. It's like, I think we need someone to assist on this. We have this new feature, this really cool feature we need to build. While I'm still working on this feature, I don't think I can accommodate handling both together.

So I need someone who works on that while I still oversee that. And gradually you begin to see new people coming and that's how people come in from even into different units, into marketing, into different units within the company.

And then... Hire people and then suddenly you have Five people, six people now working for you. What's it like to... Suddenly be a leader.

Yeah. So in this case, you kind of grow into it before you just notice one day and notice that, you have more people you are mentioning in stand-ups, you have more people you put down your notes to give like reviews for.

So it's not something you just notice, okay, now I have five people. But sometimes you just wake up and you're like, now I have this amount of people on the team.

So you kind of grow into it and... The fact that you ease into it makes it easy because there was once a time you were managing just yourself and then you realize that you have to put other people into consideration. But the fact that you ease into it and it's not a sudden thing makes it easy and there are I'd say the engineers are pretty independent and they are doing very fine on their own because that's one very important criteria you have to put into consideration when employing someone into a startup. You don't want someone you still have to micromanage.

So that's a consideration. We have people who have come in and left because of reasons like that. But people who are the solid guys on the team are because they are very self-dependent and You can trust that they are doing what they are meant to do while you oversee for and Maybe this has only some pieces, close monitor.

Rates. So now it is your...

I mean, you just said about stand-ups, like everybody has them, but I mean, if it's just you, then there is no process. But how did the processes, the tools, everything else grow.

So what is now maybe your standard set of processes or tools that you use to manage the whole team?

So we have our means of communication at Slack. I think we started with Discord, since it was just the three of us. And we had a founding engineer or product designer starting out Zoom, which the entire conversation used to be on Discord.

And then when the team started growing, we moved to Slack. We use Meet for calls.

And then sometimes when we want to have like retreats, online retreats, sometimes we switch that to Zoom where we We've had retreats that lasted like 48 hours before online and it's really nice time you have fun in between and then you have calls and then you have presentation from each team presenting what they've been working on, what they think they have for their goals for the next quarter or as the case might be or the next year. That's it. Stand-ups aren't very In a way that micromanages, but we have stand-ups every day. In Nigerian time, we have stand-ups around 9, 10 a.m. And we try to keep it as brief as possible to 10 a.m.

So it's not in just what they did yesterday, what I did today. Call out anyone who is a blocker and you can go and set it up. Because we don't sit hours on calls on stand-ups, all in the name of stand-ups and end up taking the entire engineering time. Right on course.

So, and where are your engineers based? Are they all in Nigeria or do you actually have remote engineers as well?

They're all in Nigeria, but everybody works remotely from the cockpit of their homes. And we have on-site retreats too sometimes. We've held about four or five of them on-site where we just stay together about two, three days and we brainstorm ideas and.

Everybody... Nice.

So that helps. I think a lot of us work with remote engineers from very far away. It helps if it's at least in country. And I know Nigeria is a big country, but still it's nice to bring people together and be able to actually... -Sit together.

So, and now that you've moved from like building yourself, everything and engineering, and now you're leadership position as CTO and engineering leader. What is that? Changed about how you think about building the app and doing all the work? What's different now from six, seven years ago when you started?

So before it used to be the focus was mostly around making sure the code works, right? Your goal was mostly around making sure code works, making sure there isn't theft on the system and things like that. But as time goes on, focus shifts to not just... Making sure you manage your own self or manage products. You manage other people, ensuring every engineer is doing well in their respective tasks.

So the reviews, quarterly reviews, monthly reviews as needed in some cases. Knowing when to the tough part of the work knowing when to let people go, actually.

Sometimes you build relationships with them, but understanding that you aren't just about the code, you aren't just about engineering, you are about relating with people. The emotional intelligence lets people know when they are not doing their best. And so doing things like that, it starts growing from just the code to.. Relationships with humans and relationships with other companies too actually relationship with other companies because there are integrations that involves you partnering with some other people and at that point it's just not about the code you're relating forming relationships started out really a shy person actually but over time to get rid of that and it's important.

And those businesses you partner with, are they mostly local or do you have like international businesses that you... Work with or partner with.

Right now, we focus on Nigeria. So most people, but some of these tools, some of these companies, they probably operate within Africa. But at the end of the day, we are only dealing with the Naira sector of the gold.

A quick one before we continue. If you're getting something out of this conversation, please hit the subscribe button below. That way, other tech leaders can find us as well. I would really appreciate it. Let's get back to it. And you said you have to let people go. Of course, I mean, that happens. I can sympathize how hard that is when that has to happen. It's very different. What are like in the past year, some of the biggest setbacks that you had or that...

Yeah, things that really went wrong and biggest lessons that you had to learn the hard way.

Adi Haduy. Try to give it a thought I think one important thing to learn is that sometimes the solutions to a challenge you might be thinking about is not necessarily Out. I think that's one thing I've gotten to understand. You can prevent so many problems. From happening without having to build a very sophisticated solution to solve these problems. I think that's one lesson I've learned. In fact, if the solution is complicated, probably you should think about that and look into another solution.

So sometimes the solution is just about increasing the bar, raising the bar for who can come in into some features compared to coming in and start trying to find ways or find guardrails to make sure this person can't cut away money away from the system and things like that. So that's one lesson I've learned in the course of Sometimes the solution to your problem is not good. It's just not good. Just being careful.

Having built solutions and then having to just throw it out and start from scratch again. Does that happen?

Yes, we've had a case where a feature started out and then we realized that, okay, wouldn't encourage this liaising with the compliance team. I realized, okay, we can't do this except we go in for another license to encourage this feature. And is this something we are willing to embark on right now? And when you realize that not really, it isn't. There are even sometimes it's just even about the language.

Like there are some words you aren't supposed to use. Like for example, you're not a loan system using the word loans can be puts you in trouble.

So sometimes you have to check with the compliance team from time to ensure that you are on track and don't just take decisions that can put the company in problem.

Yeah, makes sense. So, and that's all for compliance with the Nigerian laws and making sure that you stick to those.

So what inspires you? I mean, you've done this for a couple of years now. What, inspires you to just keep pushing boundaries and just keep building. What motivates you?

I think the initial motivation would be the fact that you are trying to make life comfortable for people, seeing what you used to do the hard way, done easily by other people because you made it so. But I think at the point, it stopped being that. It's just the fact that a lot of people are already using you. You can't stop now.

So you just keep pushing. That's what I figured. You just realize that you just have to keep going. There's a lot of people. There is a lot at stake. At that point, it's no longer about the initial interest. It's about the fact that you can already see a lot of people using it and trying to satisfy your customers, no matter how little they are or no matter how much they are, no matter how many people are complaining or want a feature, you need to consider that we are here for these guys and we need to make sure that we are here for them. I.

Love that. The amount of users keeps pushing you forward and you have to keep building just because there are so many people using the app. I love that. - So I was going to ask, what is in the future?

I mean, this is now very specific to Nigeria. Is that the plan or are you set similar systems or are you using other countries in Africa? Are you planning to expand or just build in Nigeria first further? What's it going to look like?

Yeah. There are plans to extend to other countries, especially countries that has a lot of Africans in them. Nigerians migrate into new locations, especially as students.

Sometimes they don't have a credit score. They can't really have access to loans in some of these countries. Via the app they can be able to like, because you have a credit score, a credit history that you have built. In Nigeria before he left Nigeria.

So we are hoping that using that and leverage on something like that to help people outside the country still come together, what's our building a trust system like that together. So yeah, we are hoping to extend into other countries. Which time but I love that in.

Works I hadn't thought of that idea I love that idea just making use of the Nigerians that emigrate to start building a foundation in other countries as well and then Well, who knows where it's going to go from there, but at least you'll maybe have foot grounds in, I don't know, the UK or the US or somewhere else in Europe. That sounds so cool. Then of course, this is the age of AI. I've got to ask anyway. What are you guys doing?

Where are you guys using it? Yeah. We use it in the community too. Remember I mentioned that we access your bank statement. And this is not because you can't build a tool for every bank statement. There's so many banks in Nigeria, some are popular, some aren't.

So you can build the same tool. You can build a single tool every time you want to integrate each new bank for your bank statement.

So what we did is we have this model that assesses your bank statement and so makes deductions we even have a feature out of it actually exposed to the users within seven days of all the assessments and your bank statements we can let you know where your money is going what consumes your money we just it's a fun feature for you to be able to assess like how have i been spending my money what have i been doing help you make better financial decisions at the end of this we make sure that we are.

That's cool. I love that. That's how even in Yeah, like I said, I don't know too much about Nigeria, so I love that even there you're just using AI to analyze bank statement and it almost sounds like anyone else would do. I love that. I didn't ask this, but I am interested. I couldn't find it anywhere online.

So I'm going to ask you the question. If you don't answer, it's fine. You guys bootstrapped or did you actually get funding somewhere along the way as a startup?

We bootstrapped, started with bootstrapping. We have family and friends around. But right now we are still like trying to get into some venture capital. What's your That's how it's been so far. No big race yet at the moment, but we are hoping to get something like.

That soon. I read that you're mentoring other software engineers or other people that are starting into software engineering in Nigeria. What's that like? And why do you do it?

Yeah, I think I'm a product of mentoring, a mentorship rather. I'm a product of that because I had someone who took interest in me and mentored me up to a certain level.

So it's something you give back to the community too. But if there's something I would say right now is that there's so many people and there's so many people who are trying to be serious at the same time.

So it's like we are in that phase where a lot of people are coming into tech. And at the end of the day you start the whole process and You only find just a few people who are ready to be serious, who are ready to take the pain because it can get rough at a point. That's how mentorship has been.

Yeah. And I love what you do.

I mean, we see, I personally work a lot with country in the Philippines, but I mean, a lot of engineers from maybe poorer countries, they tend to just go and work remotely for right? European, US companies. I love that you're building a startup locally and just making that a success locally.

So I just, I love that whole concept and that you're giving that back. I hope that more and more people go and do that and follow the route as well. It's amazing.

So I think a final question, right? And this is maybe to other software engineers, starting software engineers, either in right? US or Europe or maybe in Nigeria, what's a single piece of advice that you would give to them right now to just push and push the boundaries like you have in the past and still do today.

I think one very important thing, I believe every beginner software engineer, it applies to everyone irrespective of the country you're in. You can't emphasize the need for a community. You need a community, no matter where you find yourself. You need a community. There are a lot of self-made software engineers, but at the end of the day, I would say it's still because someone helped with their You need a second eye to view whatever challenge you're having rather than spending so much time looking into a problem. You get fresher insights. Whatever solution you think you have to a problem, there's somebody else who probably has given it a thought and has a better approach to it. Communities is always very important, no matter where you find yourself. Should have a community.

I love that because that's exactly the kind of system that you're the app that you're building is all around community so yeah comes full circle Yeah, I think it's been incredible having you on. Thank you very much. I love that. If people want to go and find you or Yes. The app Circle Funds, where can people find you?

Yeah, so the app is available on Play Store and App Store, but our official website is sqfund.io. You can just type in sqfund.io in your browser and you can find more information about us.

Thank you. And of course, we'll put that in show notes for everyone to read. But thank you very much, Eri. It's been incredible having you on. Thanks.

Yeah, thank you. As we wrap up another episode of the CTO Compass, thank you for taking the time to invest in you. The speed at which tech and AI develop is increasing. Demanding a new era of leaders in tech. Leaders that can juggle team and culture, code and infra, cyber and compliance. All whilst working closely with board members and stakeholders. We're here to help you learn from others, set your own goals and navigate your own journey. And until next time. Keep learning. Keep pushing and never stop growing.