Payment Expert’s ID Check: Payments Professional offers insights from industry leaders and experts on how they got their start in the financial. industry, from their early years in education tolimbed the corporate ladder.
This week, Nkiru Uwaje, Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer at Mansa Finance, speaks about why a “think-out-of-the-box” mindset and an understanding of financial technology have enabled her to identify stablecoins as the industry’s next solution for cross-border complexity.
Where did you go to university and what did you study? What impact did this have on your current journey?
I studied International Relations, Politics & Management at the University of Exeter. That combination ended up being remarkably relevant to what I do now.
The macroeconomics and global trade modules gave me the framework to understand how capital flows across borders, currency dynamics, and the infrastructure gaps in emerging markets that Mansa’s stablecoin liquidity business now fills.
The international relations side prepared me for navigating multi-jurisdictional operations across 10+ markets – understanding how different regulatory regimes interact and managing entities across multiple territories. The management component provided the operational toolkit for scaling a company, from structuring teams and processes to understanding unit economics and building sustainable business models.
My thesis explored how the internet transformed political discourse, which gave me early insight into how emerging technologies fundamentally reshape established systems and power structures. I apply that same analytical lens at Mansa: understanding how stablecoins can fundamentally restructure how cross-border settlement works.
What first drew you to the payments industry and why have you stayed?
Payments give us genuine insights into the true interactions and behaviours of the world, whether consumer or business. If you track an individual’s or company’s payment history over time, it reveals how the world actually works – what people do day-to-day, what they care about, and where value flows.
This is what drew me to payments initially: the realisation that the very basis of how we design payment infrastructure has ripple effects that determine governance structures, wealth distribution, access to power, and much more. It’s not just moving money – it’s architecting the rails that shape economic participation and opportunity at a fundamental level.
Are there any lessons from your first role in the industry which you still draw on?
I started my career working for a technology infrastructure company called EMC, where I was part of a rotation programme working on various global projects with senior leadership.
That gave me global operations exposure from day one – real-time exposure to how multinational technology companies actually operate across regions, time zones, and cultures. Working on those projects taught me the practical realities of scaling global businesses: resource allocation across markets, managing P&L across diverse cost structures, coordinating international vendor relationships, and executing go-to-market strategies in different regulatory and competitive environments.
The biggest lesson was that complexity isn’t just something that happens to businesses as they grow – it’s inherent in any global operation. Managing that complexity through systems, processes, and the right organisational structure became foundational to how I think about building.
Working at a technology infrastructure company also showed me that technology can truly transform things exponentially. The businesses that understood this and invested in the right infrastructure completely reshaped their industries. That insight shaped my entire career trajectory and is why I’m now building digital infrastructure that can exponentially transform financial services.
What are some of the skills you deem essential to starting in your industry, and how have yours developed over the years?
Out-of-the-box thinking is essential. If you do things like everyone else, there is no impact. In fintech, the incumbents have decades of infrastructure and regulatory relationships – you can’t compete by doing the same thing slightly better.
Early in my career, I learned that real differentiation comes from reimagining the problem entirely. This evolved from simply asking “how do we think completely new, without boundaries or limits, about what we need today?”
When we founded Mansa, we didn’t set out to make traditional correspondent banking faster. We’re building rails that bypass legacy constraints altogether. We asked: what if payment operators didn’t need to prefund accounts across dozens of countries at all? What if stablecoin liquidity could be deployed just-in-time, exactly when a transaction needs to settle?
Who was your biggest role model – inside or outside of your industry – who continues to inspire you in your current career?
My family – my parents and my two sisters. They are the cornerstones of thinking without limitations.
Growing up, I watched them approach challenges not as fixed problems with predetermined solutions, but as opportunities to imagine entirely different possibilities. They never let conventional wisdom or “how things are done” dictate what was possible.
This instilled in me the belief that boundaries are often self-imposed, and that the most interesting opportunities exist precisely where others see insurmountable constraints. In fintech, where everyone tells you what’s “impossible” due to regulation, legacy systems, or market structure, having that foundational belief that limitations are meant to be questioned has been invaluable.
They taught me that thinking without limitations isn’t reckless optimism, it’s a disciplined practice of separating real limitations from perceived ones. That mindset is what allows me to look at global payment infrastructure and ask “what if we rebuilt this from first principles?” rather than accepting the status quo.
If you didn’t work in the industry, what other career option would you have pursued or would have loved to?
Law. There’s something deeply appealing about the intellectual rigour of legal frameworks and how they shape the boundaries of what’s possible. In many ways, law is the original “code” – it’s the infrastructure that determines how power, capital, and governance actually function in society.
What draws me to law is similar to what drew me to payments: both sit at the intersection of systems design and real-world impact. Legal structures determine who has access to what, how disputes are resolved, how value is protected and transferred. They’re the architecture that enables or constrains everything else.
Running a multi-jurisdictional fintech has only deepened this fascination. I spend significant time thinking about regulatory frameworks, contract structures, and cross-border legal coordination – essentially doing the strategic work that lawyers do, just from the business side.
Understanding how different legal systems interact, where regulatory arbitrage exists, and how to structure entities and agreements across territories requires legal thinking even if I’m not practising law.
If I weren’t building payment infrastructure, I’d probably be working on the legal frameworks that govern it – shaping the rules rather than playing within them.
What is some advice you would give to an aspiring person looking to get a start in your respective industry?
Two things: remain curious, and remain consistent.
This industry moves faster than any textbook or course can keep up with. What worked yesterday might be obsolete tomorrow, and the breakthrough innovations often come from adjacent fields – blockchain from cryptography, stablecoins from monetary theory, smart contracts from legal automation.
The people who succeed are those who never stop asking “why does it work this way?” and “what if we tried something completely different?” Curiosity isn’t just about learning – it’s about constantly questioning assumptions, exploring tangential disciplines, and connecting dots that others don’t see. Read beyond your immediate domain. Understand the regulations, the technology, the economics, and the human behaviour all at once.
And then: be consistent. Building anything meaningful in fintech takes time. Many variables go into building a product – navigating regulations, building trust, establishing partnerships, and often educating the market itself about why a new approach matters. When we launched Mansa, we grew rapidly – but that growth was built on years of groundwork in understanding corridors, building relationships, and earning the trust of payment operators who were putting their settlement flows in our hands.
There will be setbacks, regulatory hurdles, technology failures, and market shifts. The difference between those who make an impact and those who don’t often comes down to who keeps showing up, keeps iterating, keeps pushing forward when progress feels slow. Consistency compounds. The insights you gain, the relationships you build, the credibility you establish – none of it happens overnight, but all of it matters over time.
