Cost discipline is rarely glamorous in the startup ecosystem. Yet in Nigeria’s fintech space, where margins are tight, infrastructure costs are unforgiving, and economic volatility is the norm, cost optimisation can be the difference between scale and stagnation.
Few people understand this better than Ayoola Samagbeyi, the engineer-turned-CTO whose decisions helped one of Nigeria’s largest digital banks scale to millions of users while cutting cloud costs by 40 per cent
Ayoola’s philosophy is simple but contrarian: technology should not just enable growth; it must protect the bottom line.
“A lot of teams treat cloud spend like an unavoidable tax,” he says. “But cloud costs are not fixed. They’re a product of engineering choices. If you design systems deliberately, you can scale and spend less, not more.”
Cutting 40% Without Cutting Corners
At Kuda, Ayoola faced the challenge many fast-growing fintechs encounter: explosive user growth paired with ballooning infrastructure bills. Millions of daily transactions meant reliability was non-negotiable, but so was sustainability.
Instead of defaulting to bigger servers and higher spend, he took a forensic look at usage patterns.
“We realised we were paying for capacity we didn’t actually need all the time,” he explains. “So, we rebuilt parts of the infrastructure to scale dynamically, not permanently.”
By re-architecting workloads in close partnership with finance, product and operations teams, optimising database queries, and eliminating redundant services, his team reduced cloud costs by roughly 40 per cent, without sacrificing performance and security controls. In some cases, service quality improved.
“The irony is that good optimisation usually makes systems faster,” he adds. “Less waste means less latency.”
Automation That Changed the Math
One of the most striking results of Ayoola’s approach was a 70 per cent reduction in customer onboarding time. In fintech, onboarding speed directly affects acquisition costs and customer satisfaction.
Rather than adding more engineers or manual processes, he doubled down on automation.
“Any process humans repeat daily is a candidate for automation,” he says. “Once we automated onboarding checks and workflows, users moved faster, errors dropped, and support costs fell.”
The result was not just operational efficiency, but a better customer experience, and proof that cost reduction and quality improvement don’t have to be trade-offs.
Why African Startups Overspend on the Cloud
Ayoola believes many African startups overspend on cloud infrastructure for structural reasons.
“There’s a copy-and-paste culture,” he argues. “Teams replicate architectures built for Silicon Valley companies without asking if those patterns make sense for their scale or market.”
Fear also plays a role. Downtime is expensive, and young startups often overprovision resources “just in case.”
“Overengineering feels safe, but it’s costly,” he says. “The cloud rewards precision, not paranoia.” His advice is blunt: start lean, measure everything, and scale intentionally.
Technology as a P&L Responsibility
For Ayoola, the real shift happens when CTOs stop seeing infrastructure as a technical concern and start treating it as a profit-and-loss issue.
“Every architectural decision has financial consequences,” he says. “If you don’t understand how your tech choices affect margins, you’re not doing the full job.”
This mindset now shapes his work at 9jaPay, where he bridges the gap between technology and executive leadership to ensure efficiency isn’t just a technical goal, but a business survival strategy.
“With FX pressure and rising costs, efficiency is survival,” he notes. “You can’t scale recklessly anymore.”
Lessons for Nigerian Founders and CTOs
Ayoola’s experience offers practical lessons for startups across Nigeria:
Design for actual usage, not hypothetical scale. Pay for what you need today, not what you fear tomorrow.
· Automate early. Manual processes are hidden cost centres.
· Measure relentlessly. If you can’t see it, you can’t optimise it.
· Make finance a first-class engineering concern.
· Most importantly, he urges CTOs to speak the language of business.
“When you walk into a boardroom, don’t just talk uptime and features,” he says. “Talk savings, margins, and sustainability.”
Scaling Smarter, Not Louder
In an ecosystem where growth is often celebrated louder than efficiency, Ayoola Samagbeyi’s story is a reminder that the most impactful leadership decisions are sometimes invisible to users, but critical to survival.
By cutting costs while scaling to millions, he has shown that disciplined engineering can unlock both resilience and growth. For Nigerian startups navigating today’s economic realities, that lesson may be more valuable than any funding round.
