Payment Expert’s ID Check: Payments Professionals offers insight from industry leaders and experts on how they got their start in the financial industry, from their early years in education, to how they have been able to climb the corporate ladder.
This week, John O’Connor, CEO of RealFi, explains what sparked his fascination with the decentralised finance (DeFi) sector, and how building infrastructure and RealFi in an African country led to challenging decisions amid civil unrest.
What was your university background and did it have an impact on your career journey to RealFi?
I studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) at Oxford. It was not a technical degree, apart from an econometrics paper that I still have nightmares about, but it shaped how I think about business and the world.
PPE forces you to look at systems from several angles at once: incentives, institutions, markets, politics, and human behaviour. That has been useful throughout my career, especially in digital assets, where the technology only matters if it can fit into the world as it actually works.
What drew you to digital assets, financial infrastructure, emerging fintech and all things RealFi?
The gap between what the financial system should be able to do and what it actually does.
Cross-border finance is still slower, more fragmented and more expensive than it should be, particularly in emerging markets. Digital assets offered a chance to rebuild some of those rails from first principles, and to connect global liquidity to economic demand on the ground. That is the problem that first pulled me into the sector, and it is still the problem behind RealFi.
What was the most important lesson from your first industry role?
That technical sophistication counts for little unless it solves a problem someone actually has.
I started in advertising technology before moving into blockchain infrastructure. In both sectors, I saw talented teams build impressive systems that did not always translate into utility. If a product does not lower a cost, unlock access, improve trust, or make something meaningfully easier for users, then the engineering has missed the point.
What would you say was your first “big break” in your career?
Joining Cardano early was the defining break. I was one of the first hires around the Cardano ecosystem and had the opportunity to help build it from a small, early-stage project into one of the most recognised blockchain networks in the world.
That experience gave me a front-row seat to both the potential and the limits of public blockchain infrastructure. It also led me to spend years working across Africa, including on large-scale identity and financial inclusion initiatives. That is where the RealFi thesis began to take shape.
What is the biggest challenge you have faced and how did you overcome it?
The hardest challenge was the Ministry of Education digital identity project in Ethiopia.
We were rolling out a national-scale digital identity system, beginning with a pilot intended to reach around five million people. The operating environment was already difficult: power cuts, infrastructure gaps, unreliable internet, and at times, internet shutdowns.
Then the political situation changed. The conflict between the TPLF and national government forces created a much more complex reality. It was no longer only a question of whether the technology could work. It became a question of what it meant to build identity infrastructure in a country experiencing conflict, where identity itself had become politically sensitive.
At the same time, our duty of care to the team became paramount. Staff were facing serious personal and operational risks, including arrests, frozen bank accounts, and a deteriorating security environment. Eventually, we had to relocate people from Ethiopia to Kenya.
There was no clean answer. I had to balance commercial obligations, public scrutiny, ethical responsibility, and the safety of the team. In the end, I called it and stepped back from the project.
That experience shaped a lot of my thinking afterwards. It reinforced my belief that emerging markets need better financial and digital infrastructure, but that scalable development is more likely to come through resilient private-sector models than through projects that depend on a single government counterparty.
What are the essential skills RealFi has taught you for a professional looking to enter your industry?
The most important skill is cross-disciplinary fluency.
Digital assets, and decentralised finance (DeFi) in particular, have moved beyond the phase where the highest headline yield wins. The market now cares much more about where yield comes from, what the risk is, how transparent the structure is, and whether the asset has genuine utility.
That means the best people in the industry need to understand more than smart contracts or tokenomics. They need to be comfortable across technology, traditional finance, risk, custody, settlement, and regulation. With frameworks like Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) in Europe and new stablecoin legislation emerging in the US, regulation is no longer an abstract concern.
The people who create the most value will be the ones who can translate between worlds: crypto, traditional finance, regulators, fintechs, and the businesses that put all of it to use.
Who is your role model in the sector and why?
I tend to admire builders more than personalities, so I would not say I put any one person on a pedestal.
Charles Hoskinson has been a mentor to me, and I respect what he has built. As a Co-Founder of Ethereum and the founder of Cardano, he has been involved in creating two of the most important ecosystems in the industry. Working around Cardano early in my career shaped how I think about infrastructure, scale, governance, and long-term execution.
I also have a lot of respect for people like Andre Cronje, who helped create an entirely new category in DeFi.
More broadly, the Bitcoin white paper was one of the reasons I became interested in the industry in the first place. It combined economics, computer science, incentives, and social coordination into an elegant argument for a new form of money. That kind of idea, where several fields come together to create something new, is what makes the sector so interesting.
If you hadn’t entered this space, what alternative career path would you have chosen?
I am not completely sure. When I left university, I was impatient, and more traditional paths like banking or strategy consulting did not feel exciting enough to me.
Looking back, I think I might have enjoyed public service more than I expected. Something in the UK civil service, perhaps around trade or the Treasury, would have been interesting. I also think I would have enjoyed the Foreign Office. Having lived and worked across Africa for close to a decade, I have seen how valuable it can be to understand a country’s politics and institutions, and help shape the relationship between that country and the UK.
The common thread is that I have always been interested in large coordination problems: how countries develop, how capital moves, and how institutions work. Digital assets became my route into those questions, but the underlying interest would probably have been the same.
What advice would you give to an aspiring professional looking to enter the payments and fintech market?
I would start by getting close to a real problem.
Fintech can sound abstract from the outside, but the best opportunities usually come from understanding where the current system is slow, expensive, opaque, or inaccessible. That might be cross-border payments, SME lending, stablecoins, compliance, identity, or embedded finance.
Technical skills still matter, but I do not think the answer is simply “learn to code” anymore. AI is changing the value of junior technical work, and the people who stand out will be those who can combine technical understanding with commercial judgement, regulatory awareness, and a clear view of what customers need.
So my advice is this: pick a problem you care about, learn the market around it, and build enough technical and financial fluency to be useful across the whole system. The best people in fintech are rarely narrow specialists. They read across users, technology, capital, and regulation, and connect the parts that others treat separately.
Interested in sharing your experiences from the industry and passing on advice to the next-generation for ID Check? Contact: [email protected]
