LAGOS — When Polaris Bank switched on an agency banking network called SurePadi in early 2020, the arithmetic facing it was not encouraging. Roughly a third of Nigerian adults sat outside the formal financial system altogether. EFInA’s benchmark survey for that year would put financial exclusion at 35.9 per cent — about 36.1 million adults — with the gap falling hardest on rural communities, where 44.2 per cent were excluded against 19.9 per cent in the cities.
What happened next moved faster than most inside the bank expected. Within 100 days, SurePadi had processed ₦10bn in transaction value — roughly £21m at the official rates then prevailing — and completed more than 500,000 services, reaching over half a million customers and an estimated two million households across seven business regions. The platform ranked fifth in the Shared Agent Network Expansion Facility’s Q1 2020 report, according to Dele Adeyinka, then Polaris Bank’s chief digital officer, who described the initiative as “part of Polaris Bank’s ongoing effort to drive financial inclusion among the underbanked and unbanked”.
The product manager who owned SurePadi end to end had joined the bank only months earlier, and had arrived from an unlikely place: a government materials testing laboratory, where his job had been to work out which buildings in Lagos were about to fall down.
Why it matters on this side of the water
For a British readership the story is less distant than it looks. More than £3bn a year flows from the UK to Nigeria in remittances — between 10 and 15 per cent of everything sent out of Britain — and the corridor has become one of the most fiercely contested in fintech, with Kuda, Flutterwave and OPay pushing fees down against the incumbents. But money sent from Peckham or Moss Side has to land somewhere at the other end, and for millions of Nigerians that somewhere is not a branch. It is an agent: a shopkeeper with a point-of-sale terminal. The quality of that network is the difference between a transfer that arrives and a transfer that strands. Baruwa spent three years building a piece of it.
From load-bearing walls to last-mile banking
Baruwa graduated from the University of Ilorin in 2017 with a degree in materials and metallurgical engineering, and spent the next eighteen months at the Lagos State Materials Testing Laboratory. There he helped organise a state-wide non-destructive testing programme across new and in-service buildings — work that, by his account, flagged roughly 3,000 structurally flawed buildings for demolition or re-engineering and contributed to a 12 per cent reduction in building collapse incidents in 2018.
“Non-destructive testing teaches you a specific discipline: you do not get to assume the structure is sound because it looks sound. You instrument it, you measure it, and you go where the data says the weakness is. That is the same job as product management. Most inclusion products fail because somebody assumed the customer would behave the way the deck said they would.”
— Abdulazeez Baruwa
He joined Polaris Bank in July 2019 as product manager for digital banking, and inherited the brief that became SurePadi: an omni-channel agent banking platform intended to extend deposits, transfers, bill payments and airtime purchases to communities where a branch was an hour’s journey away. The timing was competitive. Central Bank of Nigeria figures show banking agents rising from 11,104 in 2017 to 38,416 in 2018 and 236,940 in 2019 — a 517 per cent jump in a single year, with coverage across all 774 local government areas. Every bank in the country was signing up agents. Differentiation was going to come from execution, not from the idea.
Treating a distribution channel like a consumer product
Baruwa’s response was to refuse to treat agent banking as a distribution problem. He built a performance tracking framework around A/B testing, behavioural analytics and user segmentation, and instrumented the onboarding funnel the way he had once instrumented concrete. The figures he cites from that period: a 40 per cent reduction in onboarding drop-off, a 35 per cent increase in user retention and a 50 per cent improvement in long-term platform engagement.
The go-to-market strategy was deliberately regional rather than national — agent mobilisation targeted by area, localised branding, and mobile-first campaigns tuned to each market. Transaction volume rose 45 per cent in the first six months, and Baruwa puts SurePadi’s contribution to the bank’s P&L at approximately $1.2m, or about £0.9m. Peer institutions across emerging-market banking subsequently borrowed elements of the platform’s growth model and execution playbook.
“We spent real time in the field, in the shops and kiosks where the agents actually work. You cannot design for a rural agent from an office in Victoria Island. The moment we started segmenting agents instead of averaging them, the drop-off numbers moved.”
— Abdulazeez Baruwa
Cards, credit and the friction at the front door
In October 2020 Baruwa moved up to senior product manager for digital payments and fintech, taking on the consumer-facing side of the bank’s digital estate. Two features defined the run: same-day digital lending and instant card issuance, both built off customer research into what was actually blocking financial access rather than what the industry assumed was blocking it.
The results he reports are substantial — a 50 per cent increase in loan application volume, a 40 per cent rise in disbursement rates, 30 per cent growth in new account openings and roughly $1.5m, about £1.1m, in additional annual revenue. The instant card work targeted a narrower and more stubborn problem: the activation moment. Customers who opened accounts and then waited days for a card frequently never funded them at all. Issuing on the spot lifted account funding within the first 30 days by 40 per cent.
The work ran alongside a broader institutional pivot. In May 2021 Polaris launched VULTe, a digital-only bank offering self-service account opening, facial-recognition onboarding and embedded payday loans — a signal of how far the bank’s centre of gravity had shifted towards digital channels in under three years. Internally, Baruwa was also rebuilding delivery process, instituting structured sprint planning, backlog refinement and dynamic prioritisation models that he credits with accelerating release cycles by 30 per cent and improving resource allocation efficiency by 40 per cent.
What SurePadi proved
Baruwa left Polaris Bank in June 2022 and completed a master’s in business management at Hull University Business School the following month. He leaves behind a case that Nigerian financial inclusion arguments have needed: that the constraint was never really appetite among the unbanked, and rarely even the technology. It was the friction — the fifteen-step onboarding, the card that arrives in a week, the agent who was never trained for the customers actually walking in.
“Inclusion is not a marketing category. It is a measurement problem. Find the exact step where the person you claim to be serving gives up, and remove it. Then find the next one.”
— Abdulazeez Baruwa
