How Elizabeth Ajao revived a crypto product Quidax had stopped selling
She took Naira withdrawals from 50% to 99%, inherited a product doing zero transactions, and learned that fixing a number is the easy part.
When Elizabeth Ajao took over Basqet at Quidax in January, she opened the dashboard and found zeros.
Not low numbers but Zeros. The product had been built and launched, then left alone while the company focused on other products. Marketing and sales efforts went to other products. Some days, a single transaction would come through, and it would be five dollars.
Before Basqet, she had spent five months on something more urgent. Quidax, a crypto exchange, had migrated to a new platform, and Naira withdrawals were succeeding barely half the time. She got them to 98%. She had done this before. At Polaris Bank, two roles earlier, transfers on the digital banking app succeeded 60% of the time when she arrived and 95% when she left. In between the two, at Remita, she was part of a team that rebuilt a payment switch with no front end.
Somewhere in the middle of all this, she also started Builders in Fintech, because the answers she needed at Polaris weren’t written down anywhere and Google kept telling her how things worked in the US.
Five years earlier, she was an operations associate at a small fintech earning ₦20,000 ($15) a month, doing reconciliation, chasing designers, running activations. She asked for ₦50,000 ($37). Her boss said he was still figuring it out. She waited two months and left.
“If it took me leaving for you to see that you should pay me more, then it’s not worth it,” she said.
He called a week later offering the increase. A month after that, he called offering a ₦100,000 (₦75). She had no other job at the time. She said no both times.
There’s a common pattern that runs through Elizabeth’s career: she’s tenacious in delivering results but isn’t shy to move on to the next thing.
This conversation is mostly about Quidax. The earlier roles come in because they explain how she got there.
It has been edited for clarity and length.
What did you find when you joined Polaris?
When I joined, transfer success rates were about 60%. Imagine a full bank having 60% success rates for transfers? But before I left, I took that to about 95%.
It was basically me just working with data. There was nobody who was owning that product. And I mean sitting with the data and asking important questions like, why are transactions failing? And then just fixing each of those failure points. Some of them might be configuration, some might be engineering. And then constant monitoring.
Why leave?
I wanted to move faster than the environment allowed. Banks are built the way they’re built for good reasons. It just wasn’t where I needed to be.
Remita was next. What were you looking for there?
On the banking side, there’s already a payment infrastructure connected so that customers can pay. I wanted to explore how the infrastructure worked. How they were actually building it.
At the time, Remita was building a new switch. They’ve always had a switch, but they mostly used it for their own transactions because they have connection nodes to every bank. They wanted to package it and sell it to banks. Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS) was a monopoly, so they wanted to compete on the switching side, even taking as little as 20% of that market. They wanted to be an alternative, in cases where NIBSS was down, for example.
What did that require of the product?
The goal was to lower the switching cost for banks already using NIBSS. Make it familiar enough that moving over didn’t feel like starting from scratch. That was my project.
For the first time in my product journey, I was working on a product that had no front end. There was no front-facing element at all. It was simply backend systems. So I spent most of my time going into the database.
You left after nine months without another job lined up.
The work was hard, but I genuinely enjoyed it because that was the kind of work I wanted to do. It was more about the environment. When my spirit is no longer in a place, when I start to struggle, I’d rather take what I’ve learned and go.
You joined Quidax mid-migration. What did you meet?
They had moved to a new platform, Quidax 3.0. The main driver was scalability. The way I understand it is that there were some architecture decisions made when they built 2.0 that didn’t cater to the scale at which the platform was running, serving millions of people.
When I joined, Naira withdrawals were succeeding at about 50-something percent. With my teammates, we took that to 98, 99% in two months.
Where were the failures actually happening?
Different places. Transaction failures don’t always come from the payment provider. There are multiple places things can break before a transaction even reaches them.
Take a Naira withdrawal through a payment gateway. Before the gateway sees anything, the system runs pre-checks — things like verifying the customer’s balance. If something fails there, the transaction never moves forward. It just gets stuck. The payment gateway is never involved.
Beyond that, there were error configurations. The old system had all known errors mapped out. So if a failure happened, the team knew exactly what it meant and what to do. A liquidity issue with a provider, for example, had a clear response. The new system lost all of that mapping, so the same errors were now unfamiliar and harder to resolve quickly.
There was also a structural problem. The system was originally built assuming a single payment provider. Switching to multiple providers required architectural changes on the engineering side. It wasn’t just a configuration fix.
What did that pressure of improving success rate feel like day to day?
When something breaks, the product manager is the first call, before anyone even gets to the engineers. You become the first line of response for everything.
Most days, I open my laptop, and I’m already triaging before I’ve started actual work. I asked myself many times in the morning, “Which battle am I fighting again today?”
You went from fixing a broken product to inheriting one mostly in maintenance mode. What did Basqet look like when you took it over?
Basqet is a cryptocurrency payment gateway that lets African businesses, creators, and freelancers accept digital currencies and settle in fiat. The problem wasn’t transactions at first. It was onboarding. A lot of people were signing up and not completing. And a fairly good number would onboard, and their KYB would get rejected.
I went to the data and set up calls with customers. And I asked compliance, why do you guys keep rejecting this? They said the information isn’t complete. A fintech or a bank signs up, and because you’re a bank, we need an extra document, so they reach out and sometimes don’t hear back.
So compliance was only telling people what they needed after the fact?
Exactly. So I did a customer segmentation. Freelancers who get paid by clients. Corporates and businesses. Financial institutions.
Then several ideation calls with compliance. For freelancers, what do we need? For corporates, what do we need that we wouldn’t need from a freelancer? For financial institutions, what are the extra things? So each customer type has a different KYB flow. When it gets to the compliance desk, they know that for this type, I already have everything I need. I can review and approve at once.
Approval rates went up by over 80%.
What else changed?
I added guided onboarding, rather than assuming the customer knows everything. If we ask for CAC documents, we show a preview so you can see what it looks like while you’re filling it. And if you started and left, we send an email. None of that was happening before.
How did merchants come in, with no marketing budget?
Mostly inbound. But I was also just tenacious. I joined sales calls and did demos. And when the merchants came in, I kept close contact. If I see a merchant not transacting, I’m like, what’s going on? Sometimes they tell me they had an issue, and my response is, ‘Okay, wait. I’ll come back after five hours.” It gets fixed, and they begin transacting.
I was also wearing the hat of a salesperson, more or less like evangelising the product to a merchant.
Did any changes happen with the product itself?
Yes. When I joined, it was just a crypto payment link. I said, why don’t we transform this into an actual payments gateway? That’s when we started having conversations about being a Payment Service Provider (PS). So other fintechs can connect to us. I added fiat.
And how did all these impact volume?
If I were to quantify. It’ll be up to a 10,000% increase in volume. Now let me explain.
When I joined, a single transaction might be five dollars. By the time I left, I was seeing transactions of five thousand.
Next, you moved on to work on the currency expansion across Africa, which wasn’t originally yours.
Yes. It was handled by a colleague who was already overseeing our core API products, in a quarter where expansion was one of the company’s top priorities. That’s two of the company’s biggest bets on one person.
I reached out, asked if he was comfortable, and offered to support him. He mentioned it in a product meeting, and my manager made it official. The month before I left, he came back to me and said it turned out to be the right call. I’m glad I said something when I did.
What did expansion across different African markets teach you that you didn’t expect?
A lot of providers lie. I don’t want to say lie, so put it mildly, I’d say they over-sell what they can do.
Based on my background, I’ve learned to ask better questions. Questions that make me know what you’re capable of and what you’re not, before we even look at your documentation or start to integrate.
Every provider has strengths and weaknesses. One we worked with claimed broad coverage, but what they were actually good at was South Africa. Every other market they were just attempting.
Was there pressure to just integrate and find out?
More of an expectation. But I changed that. Before, the default was to just integrate, but if a provider offers what we already have, what’s the point?
This was your first time in a position where you were brokering partnerships. What’s something that shocked you about the role?
How hard the providers pushed. There were times when two or three who had my WhatsApp and would text me to follow up. Before I’ve replied, they’re calling. There was an instance where I’d done a full walkthrough with a company, only to be invited to another meeting the following Friday, and it was the same company doing the same walkthrough. Their country director had gone to a C-level executive at Quidax.
I’d already told my team we can’t work with them based on my assessment of their capabilities. So we didn’t go ahead with them. What I like about Quidax is leaders are very receptive to feedback.
How did you test before launch?
I ran beta tests for many currencies before I left. I was hustling testers from different parts of Africa, just speaking to friends, getting them to use it before general access.
You’ve left Quidax. What are you looking at now?
I’m doing a master’s in innovation in the UK, and I’m doing a product internship at Cloudflare. Alongside that, I’ve also been volunteering with their agentic payments team. It’s fairly new, under a year old.
They’re building payment products for the internet, combining blockchain and AI. Making it possible for agents to pay for services. They’re also building their own stablecoin, called Net Dollar.
That’s outside your actual internship. Why take it on?
I pitched to the director that I have experience on the local currency side, on-ramps and off-ramps, and I can help them figure that out. They’re having me do research work.
My payments experience has been execution. Taking something broken and making it work. No reinvention, just rigour. This is different. The problem hasn’t been solved yet. I want to be in the room where that’s happening.