Leading our UK operations is the assignment I am most proud of – Simi Adeoye, Ag MD, CashToken Rewards International UK

Simi Daphne Adeoye, Acting Managing Director of CashToken Rewards International UK, a subsidiary of CashToken Rewards Africa based in Lagos, is a business development expert, market entry specialist and business expansion guru with extensive experience in building operations in international markets. In fact, in the last seven years, she has been responsible for the expansion of CashToken Rewards into Liberia, South Africa and the UK, setting up operations, leading regulatory engagement and negotiating partnerships across banking, telecommunications, energy, and consumer goods, while also concluding agreements directly with governments in these countries.

Not only these. Simi has also led partner acquisition across Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Uganda and Tanzania on behalf of a multinational client of the company. A professional whose remit is the full act of market entry, her work sits at the intersection of commercial negotiation and technical delivery, leading regulatory and licensing engagement, building local partnerships, assembling local teams and adapting the proposition to how people in the new markets earn, spend, and are rewarded.

Holder of a degree in Creative Arts from the University of Lagos and a postgraduate qualification in oil and gas sector soft skills, Simi started out as Executive Assistant to the Group Managing Director of CashToken Rewards Africa, Aare Prof Lai Labode, whom she described as a “visionary in the truest sense, a builder with rare combination of imagination and conviction, who sees a market before it exists, and then has the patience and courage to build toward it”. According to her, the Executive Assistant to the CEO seat has been the most useful part of her story in the organisation in that it gave her a full view of how the business worked, how decisions were made, how partners were won and lost, and what the CEO was reading and worrying about. Thus, she sees it as an apprenticeship stage rather than an administrative post.

From there, she was moved into Business Development and subsequently got appointed as the Head of Business Development and Expansion. Thereafter, she became the Chief Expansion Officer even as her mandate widened from individual deals to whole countries and establishing the company’s presence in new markets. Today, she is the Acting Managing Director of their first operation outside Africa, the UK. Said she about the UK market: “It is a mature, heavily regulated and highly competitive rewards market where we have had  to earn attention rather than assume it. It is the assignment I am most proud of.”

Asked of unforgettable times in her career, she offered: “ The most memorable thing about my career is not a single event. It is the nature of what CashToken built: a product that allows businesses to create genuine emotional equity with their consumers, and through which millionaires are made every single week. I did not appreciate the weight of it until I began seeing the testimonials. In a testimonial, it is a trader whose circumstances changed overnight. That reframed the work for me permanently.”

Speaking on goals, she declared: “Our major goal is simply stated: “think reward, think CashToken. Globally, I want the name to become the first thing a business anywhere reaches for when it decides to reward its customers. That is the destination. My work now is to take the UK operation from launch to a profitable business that sustains itself, to broaden the partner base across retail, travel, food, fuel and financial services, and to earn the trust of a market that does not hand it out easily.”

And to upcoming female professionals she advised them not to let the room they started in define the room they end in. Using herself as a graphic example, she said she studied Creative Arts and started out as executive assistant, but now serves as Acting Managing Director of her company’s international branch. She thus counselled them: “There is no limits to what you can achieve”.