Adeleke Funmilayo Tunrade has quietly emerged as one of the most influential forces shaping how money moves across Africa and beyond.
Her journey began humbly at MTN Communications in Lagos, shortly after earning her degree in economics. Thrown into the heart of enterprise billing operations, she found herself coordinating transformation initiatives that tested both her technical acumen and her empathy. It was here, working with cross-functional teams to fix rate-structure errors and resolve customer frustrations, that she developed a deep appreciation for process design and operational discipline.
“From the beginning, I realized that people don’t just want systems that work, they want systems that make sense,” she said in a recent conversation. “That understanding shaped everything for me.”
A move to Union Bank brought her closer to the nerve center of financial risk. Within the reconciliation and dispute resolution unit, Adeleke’s ability to detect patterns in data led to the recovery of millions in previously lost funds. Rather than merely reacting to errors, she engineered frameworks that prevented them altogether. It was here that she embraced Lean Six Sigma, beginning a lifelong pursuit of operational excellence grounded in data.
That mindset followed her into Xpress Payment Solutions, where she took on the challenge of transforming real-time transaction monitoring and reconciliation systems. She introduced automated dashboards that halved dispute-resolution time and built early-warning mechanisms to detect fraud. These innovations didn’t just improve performance; they gave her colleagues the breathing room to focus on higher-value work.
Her tenure at Pollard Consulting widened her lens further. Here, she applied surgical precision to business analysis and project data reporting, helping leadership teams uncover bottlenecks and drive strategic clarity. But it was at Flutterwave, which she joined in 2020, that her unique blend of technical rigor and people-centered leadership would reach full expression.
As Payment Operations Manager, Adeleke oversaw millions of transactions daily across acquiring and issuing platforms. Rather than getting lost in the volume, she saw opportunities to automate, refine, and empower. Her team built real-time dashboards that tracked success rates, created automated reconciliation modules, and streamlined previously manual refund workflows.
“Operational excellence is not about having perfect systems—it’s about designing for adaptability,” Adeleke noted. “When something fails, the system should not fall apart. It should learn.”
Her promotion to Senior Manager, Global Payment and Operations, brought broader responsibilities across markets. She reengineered the chargeback lifecycle using Lean Six Sigma principles, built an automated chargeback engine, and embedded audit-friendly workflows that dramatically reduced error rates and dispute handling time. She also deepened cross-functional collaboration—holding regular forums with engineering, risk, and compliance to ensure shared accountability.
By 2024, as Head of Disputes & Chargeback and Remittance Operations, Adeleke had become the beating heart of Flutterwave’s operational resilience. She rebuilt reconciliation frameworks, increased payout reliability to 96 percent, and introduced dynamic payout-switching logic to reroute traffic during rail downtimes. Her innovations helped recover over $100 million in failed transactions while elevating customer experience metrics across the board.
Beyond the numbers an 85 percent drop in errors, an 80 percent boost in efficiency, and an 86 percent decline in complaints—her impact is felt in how teams now work and think. She has nurtured a culture of curiosity and continuous improvement, mentoring operators to use tools like Power BI and encouraging everyone to question assumptions and build real-time prototypes.
Colleagues describe her as a leader who simplifies without dumbing down. “She has a way of turning chaos into clarity,” one teammate said. “And she does it with calm, empathy, and exacting standards.”
Adeleke’s influence now reaches into compliance and product development, where she champions customer transparency, regulatory alignment, and frictionless design. Whether refining remittance dashboards or closing loopholes in payment gateways, she approaches each task with the conviction that the most human-centered solutions are also the most scalable.
Her story is still unfolding. But what’s clear is that Adeleke Funmilayo Tunrade is more than a fintech leader, she’s a transformer of systems, a builder of people, and a quiet force driving the future of payments in Africa.
