Amara Okafor.

Q. Most fintech founders describe themselves as disruptors. You describe what Conduit does as 'extremely boring'. Why?

A. Because the parts of cross-border payments that are genuinely broken are not the parts anyone wants to put on a pitch deck. The unglamorous parts — nostro accounts, correspondent banking fees, the seven-day settlement tail on a Ghanaian cedi transaction — those are the parts that cost the world's economy, I think, somewhere between sixty and eighty billion dollars a year in pure drag. Boring is where the money is.

Q. Conduit is a B2B company buried inside other companies. Was that always the plan?

A. No. We started out thinking we would build a consumer product. We spent six months on it, shipped two versions, and realised that every customer we were excited about was actually a company, not a person. We had a very uncomfortable offsite in early 2023 where we agreed to delete the consumer app. I still think it was the right decision and I still think about the app sometimes at three in the morning.

Q. You spent eighteen months at Wise as a policy person rather than a builder. How did that shape Conduit?

A. It taught me that regulators are almost always more reasonable than fintech Twitter thinks they are — and almost always more under-resourced than fintech founders assume. If you turn up early, show your working, and do not try to be clever, they will meet you more than halfway. If you turn up late with a lawyer and a press release, they will correctly assume you are trying to get away with something. I have tried to build Conduit the first way.

Q. What is overrated in fintech right now?

A. AI agents moving money autonomously. Not because the tech won't work — it will, eventually — but because the people excited about it have, on the whole, never sat in a room with a compliance officer who has just caught a mule network. The hardest problem in payments is not latency. It is accountability: who signs, who is liable, who explains it to the regulator on a Tuesday morning. An agent cannot do any of those three things. Yet.

Q. And what is underrated?

A. Private banks. They have the hardest customers, the deepest balance sheets and the most patient capital in the entire sector, and they are almost completely absent from fintech press coverage. The smartest crypto desk in Europe is inside a two-hundred-year-old Swiss institution most of your readers have never heard of. That is going to matter.

Q. What is one thing Conduit got materially wrong?

A. We launched in Nigeria twelve months too early. I wanted to prove we could operate in a difficult corridor before we tackled the easy ones, and the hubris of that decision cost us roughly four million pounds and our first head of compliance, who left — very politely — to go and work for a regulator. I still owe her dinner.