Across Nigeria, few banking frustrations were more maddening than watching your money disappear during a transfer with no clear resolution in sight. For millions of Nigerians, the phrase “your transaction failed but your money has been deducted”, became an unfortunate but common part of banking life.

The numbers told the story. By mid-2019, Nigeria was processing over 250 million NIP (NIBSS Instant Payment)transactions every quarter, according to data from the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System. But behind those transactions were thousands—sometimes millions—of unresolved complaints. Customers waited days, sometimes weeks, for failed funds to be reversed.

Some never got them back. Banks struggled to trace failures across fragmented systems, while NIBSS and the Central Bank received growing pressure to improve service reliability. In the midst of this mounting tension, a quiet solution emerged—one that would eventually reshape the dispute resolution infrastructure across Nigerian banks.

The innovation wasn’t flashy, and its creator wasn’t looking for headlines. But insiders say that in late 2018, a Lagos-based product engineer named Olushola Babalola designed and deployed a smart dispute resolution system that would later be integrated into the backend operations of some of Nigeria’s largest financial institutions. The tool, now known in banking circles as the Smart Dispute Resolution Engine (SDRE), didn’t just detect failed transactions. It knew what to do about them—automatically.

What made SDRE revolutionary wasn’t its interface—it didn’t have one. It worked beneath the surface, analysing payment patterns, flagging anomalies, and initiating real-time reversal workflows. When a transaction failed, the system didn’t wait for a customer to lodge a complaint. It triggered an automated confirmation with the receiving bank. If the credit didn’t reflect, SDRE initiated a refund protocol—often within minutes. And if a pattern of failures was detected across the same merchant terminal or bank route, it flagged it as a high-risk node and escalated it through internal fraud resolution systems.

“This wasn’t just an operations tool—it changed how we treated customer pain,” said a senior executive at one of Nigeria’s leading banks, which adopted the system in early 2019. “Before this, we were reactive. Now we were finally ahead of the problem.”

In a pilot test across two banks, SDRE was able to resolve 73 per cent of NIP disputes within two hours—a process that previously averaged three to seven business days. The effect on customer satisfaction was immediate. Complaints dropped. Call center queues shortened. Customers posted screenshots online showing reversals arriving before they could even send an email.

By the third quarter of 2019, at least three Tier 1 financial institutions had adopted the system, either directly or through modified integrations into their dispute workflow. One institution used SDRE to power bulk dispute handling for failed ATM withdrawals, processing over 1.2 million automated reversals in a six-month window. Another built a visual monitoring dashboard on top of the engine, enabling its digital teams to track real-time resolution rates across all digital payment channels—NIP, POS, and cardless withdrawals.

What set Olushola’s work apart was its deep empathy for the invisible pain of customers. His system wasn’t built just for technical scale; it was designed to restore trust. And trust was in short supply. Between 2016 and 2018, Nigerian banking customers had begun to grow skeptical of digital channels—not because of a lack of access, but because of a lack of confidence in what would happen when things went wrong.

Regulators noticed the shift. In a 2019 stakeholder roundtable, a NIBSS official praised “the advancements in real-time refund automation” and their role in increasing user retention across payment platforms. Though the speech didn’t name the developer, fintech leaders in attendance knew who had led the design of the framework that had started it all.

For Olushola Babalola, the acclaim was never the goal. Colleagues say he preferred to stay behind the scenes, often choosing to spend time debugging service flows and reverse-engineering failure logs long after others had closed their laptops for the day. But for those who understand the true nature of product impact—not in downloads or design awards, but in the silent relief of a mother whose transfer goes through without issue—his work is among the most important innovations Nigeria’s fintech space has seen in a decade.

He didn’t build the mobile apps. He didn’t own the NIP rails. But he designed the logic that made Nigeria’s digital payment ecosystem less painful, more human, and finally, trustworthy.

When the money stopped hanging, it wasn’t luck or policy that made it happen. It was product leadership—done right, done quietly, and done at scale.