|By Adeola Olaniyi
Three years ago, a handful of practitioners, ignored at the time, told Nigeria’s fintech and healthtech industries that their growth models were built on a trust deficit that would eventually surface. In 2025, that deficit is no longer theoretical. And the frameworks those practitioners proposed are quietly becoming the new standard.
Somewhere in the archives of Nigerian tech media, there is a 2022 article about digital wallet activation rates. The headline asked a simple question: why is nobody using the wallets that Nigeria is so proud of having launched? It cited a practitioner from inside the banking sector who gave what was, at the time, an unfashionable answer. The problem, she said, was not the technology. It was trust. And the industry, she predicted, would spend the next two to three years discovering this the expensive way.
It is now 2025. The industry has spent close to three years discovering it the expensive way.
The Nigerian digital payments sector recorded its first significant public contraction in active wallet usage in Q1 2024, with CBN data showing that the ratio of active to registered wallets declined for the first time since the mobile money push began in earnest. Multiple fintech startups that had raised Series A and Series B rounds on the strength of user acquisition numbers quietly laid off product staff. Several healthtech platforms that had announced geographic expansion into new Nigerian states in 2022 and 2023 are now contracting back to their original urban footprints, reassessing their unit economics and product strategies simultaneously.
And the practitioners who predicted all of this — who named the mechanism, described the failure mode, and proposed an alternative — are being called back into the conversation.
Adeola Olaniyi is not surprised by what has happened to the Nigerian digital products market in the past years. She is, if anything, mildly frustrated that the timeline she anticipated — two to three years, she said in 2022 — proved roughly accurate.
“I was not making a sophisticated prediction in 2022. I was describing what I could see from where I was standing. The activation data was not visible publicly, but anyone who was working inside a bank branch and paying attention could observe the pattern: registrations were going up, but the behaviour change that makes a digital wallet useful was not following. When the behaviour does not follow the registration, the number is hollow. It was always going to deflate. The only question was when.” Adeola Olaniyi affirms her insight.
“The progressive trust model is not complicated. It is just slow. You build the product around the user’s trust journey, not around your growth targets. You design every early interaction to deliver a confirmed, positive outcome before you ask the user to deepen their engagement. You treat the first transaction not as a conversion event but as a trust audit. If the user trusts the product after that transaction, you have built something. If they don’t, you have a registration number and nothing else.”
“You treat the first transaction not as a conversion event but as a trust audit.”
What is notable about the current moment in Nigerian digital products is not only that the correction Adeola predicted has arrived, but that a small cohort of startups and digital platform operators appear to have taken her warnings seriously enough to adjust their product strategies ahead of the correction.
Across the Nigerian fintech and healthtech landscape, a pattern has emerged among the companies that are faring best in 2024: they share a product philosophy that is remarkably consistent with the framework Adeola was advocating in 2022 and 2023. Trust-first onboarding. Staged feature introduction. Relentless focus on the quality and reliability of the first user interaction rather than the quantity of interactions. Value delivery before commitment requests.
When pressed, the product leaders at several of these companies make reference — some directly, some obliquely — to the same observation that Adeola first articulated in public. “We stopped thinking about activation and started thinking about trust,” one senior PM at a Lagos-based digital health platform told the media, speaking on condition of anonymity. “The shift happened when we started looking at what was happening in fintech — specifically at the practitioners who were criticising the growth-at-all-costs approach. That criticism felt applicable to us, and we acted on it.”
The Healthtech Sector Finds Its Footing
In the healthtech space, the parallel correction has been less visible publicly but equally significant operationally. Several of the platforms that were profiled in mid-2023 — when the sector’s scaling wall was beginning to become apparent to the companies experiencing it — have since undergone material product redesigns. The common thread in these redesigns: a shift away from front-loaded registration and commitment flows and toward what is now being described, in product circles, as trust-graduated product architecture.
The language is new. The idea is not. It is, substantially, the framework that Adeola described in her 2023 analysis — the argument that healthtech products needed to sequence trust-building experiences before commitment-requiring ones, rather than assuming that the urgency of a health need would override the user’s structural reluctance to engage with a digital platform they did not yet have reason to trust.
“I described trust sequencing in 2023,” Adeola notes, with characteristic directness. “What I am now seeing in the product redesigns being announced by healthtech companies is trust sequencing under different terminology. I do not think the attribution matters. I think the outcome matters. If the products are better for Nigerian users because the industry finally understands that trust is a design variable, that is the important thing.”
“Trust is a design variable. The industry is finally beginning to treat it as one.”
The Nigerian digital economy is not in crisis. It is in recalibration, which is a healthier condition, if a less photogenic one. The recalibration is producing, in real time, a product management culture that is more honest about the distinction between registered users and active users, more rigorous about the trust dynamics of its target populations, and more willing to accept that the path to scale in the Nigerian market runs through trust rather than around it.
Adeola’s contribution to this shift is difficult to quantify, precisely because much of it operated through the mechanisms that influence tends to operate through: articles that were read by the right people at the right moment, arguments that gave language to intuitions that product teams were already forming but had not yet articulated, frameworks that circulated informally through the practitioner community before they appeared in product strategy documents.
What can be said with more confidence is that the warnings she made in 2022 were accurate, that the framework she proposed in 2023 is now being adopted under various names by the companies that are managing the correction best, and that the Nigerian digital products sector is, in 2025, a somewhat better-designed ecosystem than it was three years ago. The practitioner community that got the analysis right deserves to have that noted.
Adeola is, characteristically, more interested in what happens next. “The correction is happening in the first-generation digital wallet and health platform space. But the same assumptions — that technology is the barrier, that UI improvement is the fix, that trust is a given rather than something that has to be constructed — are now being imported wholesale into the next generation of Nigerian digital infrastructure. AI-powered financial advisory tools. Digital identity platforms. Automated credit scoring systems. The same mistakes are being set up in a new context. So the conversation is not over. It is just moving to a different part of the sector.”
