How Daniel Benjamin built products that scaled across Africa’s fintech boom

Daniel Benjamin started learning how to code on his mother’s Nokia phone. For two years, without a laptop, he researched W3Schools on that small screen, taking meticulous notes on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript while his peers focused on preparing for entrance exams. It’s the kind of detail he rarely shares, calling it “a very suppressed memory,” but it reveals something essential about his approach to building software: when you want something badly enough, you find a way.

Before the Nokia phone, there were the robots. At 13, Benjamin and his best friend would travel across Lagos to the bustling markets of Mushin, hunting for rotary motors, batteries, and any spare parts they could afford. They followed YouTube tutorials, cobbling together machines that weren’t particularly intelligent but moved on their own power. “These robots were not smart or anything, but they were moving,” Benjamin recalls, and you can still hear the satisfaction in his voice. That early obsession with making things work, with turning abstract ideas into physical reality, never really left him. It just shifted from hardware to software, from motors and circuits to code that now serves hundreds of thousands of users across multiple countries.

Today, Benjamin is a senior software engineer whose work has spanned some of Nigeria’s most prominent fintech companies during the sector’s explosive growth. He’s led mobile teams, rewritten entire applications under brutal deadlines, reduced crash rates from 5.57% to 0.39%, and contributed to products that have scaled across Africa. But his journey from those Mushin market trips to building systems that handle millions of user interactions reveals something more interesting than a simple success story. It shows how the best engineers learn to balance technical excellence with speed, how they develop empathy for users they’ll never meet, and why the ability to communicate clearly often matters more than writing perfect code.

The turning point came at age 15, when an NYSC intern teaching at his public school, Angus Memorial Senior High School, introduced him to jQuery and web development. His robotics partner had just left to study medicine at the University of Lagos, and Benjamin needed something to occupy his relentless curiosity. Without the laptop that would come two years later, he turned to his mother’s phone, laying the foundation for a career spanning fintech, healthtech, and now AI-powered spiritual technology.

Building through Nigeria’s fintech boom

Benjamin’s career unfolded during a particularly dynamic period for Nigerian technology. While still at university, he helped build the Sabi app, which was eventually acquired by Piggyvest. His work spanned several fintech companies, including Risevest, where he led the mobile team and contributed to the company’s expansion across multiple African countries.

At Risevest, Benjamin encountered the tension that defines much of senior engineering work: balancing technical excellence with speed and user impact. Working on an application used by hundreds of thousands of people across Africa forced him to recalibrate. Stakeholders needed features delivered quickly, and users needed stability, especially for a fintech product. Benjamin learned that the solution wasn’t to compromise on quality. It was to build an infrastructure that supported both craft and speed.

His team developed a design system and component templates that dramatically reduced the time required to ship new features. They standardised on a single style guide, ensuring consistency across the product. Every decision was anchored to measurable outcomes. How long would this take? What’s the actual impact? These questions became central to how Benjamin thought about engineering leadership, teaching him to push a team while taking ownership of complex technical decisions.

But the major challenge wasn’t even technical. It was communication: clarifying missing flows with stakeholders, negotiating product decisions, and making the case for changes that would improve the user experience in the long term. “The thing about doing hard stuff is that it is hard and it pushes you,” he says. That project reinforced a principle that has guided his career since: communication is the backbone of startups, and there’s no such thing as over-communication.

Open Source, empathy, and writing code for strangers

Benjamin’s first open source contribution came in 2021. He was using a phone validation library and discovered that Nigerian “091” numbers weren’t supported. He could have patched it locally and moved on. Instead, he opened a pull request, added support for the missing prefix, explained the issue to the maintainers, and they merged it the next day.

The experience shifted how he thought about software development. He realised he could contribute to something that would help another Nigerian avoid the same frustration. He could have solved it just for himself, but extending that fix to everyone using the library felt meaningful. He went on to contribute to several open source projects. One of his favourites is Grafana, a monitoring and observability platform with over 61,000 stars on GitHub, where the standard of review is unforgiving.

Open source work taught Benjamin to write with empathy. In these projects, no one knows your name or your track record. Your code has to be clear, well-documented, and handle edge cases that might not be immediately obvious. Contributors around the globe will examine your work, and if something doesn’t make sense, they’ll say so without hesitation. That rigorous process taught him to think about backward compatibility and how changes would affect users already relying on existing behaviour.

The lessons transferred directly into his professional work, improving how he reviewed code and communicated technical decisions. He became more deliberate about balancing technical rigour with clarity and politeness, understanding that miscommunication over text is common and costly in distributed teams.

Building products that scale

When asked about where his career is heading, Benjamin is very direct. He doesn’t know what he’ll be solving next, but he’s keeping his options open. What he does know is that he wants to be recognised for building systems at scale, for delivering features that work reliably for hundreds of thousands of users. 

His contributions to fintech products like Savi.ng and Risevest exemplify this. His work on these products helped make the apps more stable, streamlined mobile workflows, and built systems that could support growth across multiple African countries. These contributions were essential in helping these fintech platforms scale reliably and serve more users effectively.

For engineers looking to advance, Benjamin emphasises ownership and systems thinking. The difference between a senior engineer and a mid-level one, he argues, isn’t just technical ability. It’s understanding where each feature fits within the larger product vision, knowing what you’re building towards, and being able to communicate those connections to stakeholders and teammates. As AI makes code generation more accessible, the differentiating skill isn’t writing code. It’s writing code that solves the right problem, in a way that’s maintainable, empathetic to users, and aligned with business outcomes. That distinction is what Benjamin has spent the last decade learning to embody.