TUROG uncovered: How this KPMG Alum quietly built the infrastructure for digital banking in Africa
After 25 years in tech and consulting, Seyi Akamo is building, Turog, the invisible infrastructure that powers Africa's $65 billion digital banking revolution
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In the early 2000s, computing professionals had just prevented the Y2K disaster. Most Nigerians were still figuring out what the internet was. A young Seyi Akamo held his first Cisco certification in his hands. The CCNA — Cisco Certified Network Associate — was his entry ticket into a world that barely existed in Lagos at the time. At the time, “internet connection” meant a trip to the nearest cybercafé, and storage meant floppy disks that held 1.44 megabytes, if you were lucky.<br />
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He remembers one evening, shuttling back and forth between his computer and that cybercafé, trying to install a single program. Download a dependency. Trip back. Discover it needs another dependency. Another trip. Twelve, maybe fifteen times in a single night.<br />
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“There was no DHL for software,” he recalls, sitting in TUROG’s Lagos office two decades later. “But Ubuntu did something crazy — shipit.ubuntu.com. You could order Ubuntu CDs anywhere in the world. I got ten delivered in 2004. That was not easy to do.”<br />
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The Ubuntu founder was the man behind Thawte, the company that invented SSL certificates — those padlock icons on secure websites. He’d made his money and was giving away operating systems for free. At the time, he was the richest African on earth.<br />
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But it wasn’t the free software that shaped Seyi’s trajectory. It was what came later, in the mid-2010s, when PayPal announced its arrival in Nigeria.<br />
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“The only thing in Nigeria was PayPal, where money leaves your pocket,” Seyi says. “Not an ability to actually earn via PayPal. I realised that at the financial infrastructure level, we were really, really behind.”<br />
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That irritation would eventually give rise to TUROG Technologies. But first came 13 years of learning how to build the invisible architecture that makes modern finance work.<br />
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The making of a builder<br />
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Technology was one of the few things Seyi could do entirely alone. “You want to play football, you need at least one person,” he explains. “But comp...
