”Technology should serve everyone not just elites’ – The Nation Newspaper’
Victor Daniyan, the entrepreneur behind Nearpays and Yourrider, is focused on solving everyday economic challenges across Africa. From helping market vendors accept digital payments to enabling new models for clean energy and mobility, his mission is simple: make technology work for everyone, not just the privileged few.
Building for everyday Africa
Daniyan’s passion for inclusive solutions was shaped by growing up in Nigeria, where basic transactions like sending money or paying at markets were often slow, costly, and unreliable. Early experience at a local fintech showed him how simple, well-designed tools could remove friction and bring real value to people and businesses. That conviction now drives his work: make daily economic activity easier, faster, and safer for all.
Lowering barriers with hardware-free payments
Nearpays turns ordinary smartphones into POS terminals, removing the need for expensive hardware and complicated setups. This matters most to Nigeria’s informal sector—market traders, kiosks, micro-retailers—who can now accept digital payments immediately using devices they already own. The outcome is higher sales, fewer cash-handling risks, and greater participation in the formal economy.
Equally important are lower fees. With rising inflation and tight margins, small and medium businesses need cost relief. Nearpays’ softPOS offers more affordable processing than traditional terminals, allowing merchants to keep more revenue for stock, staffing, and growth. The result is practical inclusion: digital tools that meet people where they are and pay for themselves through everyday use.
Kaizen as a daily discipline
Continuous improvement is embedded across Nearpays and Yourrider. Teams are encouraged to propose and test incremental changes weekly—from streamlining onboarding to refining payment flows. Regular product iterations use real user feedback, resulting in smoother checkouts, stronger reliability, and additions like offline capabilities when connectivity is spotty. Support teams feed insights back to engineers, creating a fast loop of learning, building, and improving. This discipline keeps the companies agile and closely aligned with customer needs.
Financial inclusion as a core mission
For Daniyan, access is a right, not a privilege. Technology should close gaps, not widen them. That belief underpins efforts to make financial services affordable, secure, and intuitive for individuals and businesses traditionally left out of formal systems. The broader goal is to empower entrepreneurship, catalyze grassroots growth, and create a more participatory economy.
Scaling AI-driven payments across Africa
With more than 60,000 SMEs on the platform, the team sees a clear path to scale. Trust, simplicity, and speed have driven adoption so far; AI is the next lever to deepen it. Advanced fraud detection, personalized merchant tools, and smoother transaction experiences can expand usage while maintaining security. The timing aligns with Africa’s youthful, mobile-first population that embraces practical digital solutions when they are clear, reliable, and affordable.
Why recognition matters
Industry accolades serve as validation for solving real problems at scale. More than trophies, they signal that the work resonates beyond local markets and help attract partners, talent, and capital. For Nearpays and Yourrider, such recognition fuels ambition: build bigger, move faster, and help place African innovation on the global map.
Where payments meet EV charging
Payments and EV charging may seem like separate tracks, but they converge in Africa’s emerging markets. Charging is a critical service; payments are the rails that make it accessible. Integrating digital payments into charging networks unlocks pay-as-you-go models, enabling users to pay with mobile money or cards in real time. This reduces upfront costs, encourages experimentation, and accelerates adoption.
The same softPOS tech that equips merchants to accept digital payments can also turn them into potential micro-charging points, adding new revenue streams while expanding charging availability. In a landscape where infrastructure is still developing, modular, payment-enabled solutions can help the ecosystem leapfrog traditional, capital-intensive rollouts.
A vision for fintech and clean energy
The future Daniyan envisions blends fintech with clean energy to unlock mass adoption. Digital payments power solar home systems, micro-grids, and EV networks through flexible, usage-based models that fit real-world income patterns. By embedding finance into energy delivery—pay-as-you-go, subscriptions, microloans—households and businesses can access reliable power without prohibitive upfront costs.
This intersection does more than electrify; it fuels productivity, education, and commerce. It helps people work longer hours safely, store perishables, operate machinery, and move goods. When finance and energy align, growth compounds—benefiting communities from the bottom up.
Technology for all
At the heart of it is a simple standard: technology should serve everyone. By removing barriers, iterating relentlessly, and aligning innovation with everyday realities, companies like Nearpays and Yourrider aim to extend participation in the digital economy—so more people can transact, build, and thrive.
