Nigerian businesses struggling with tight cash flow must start treating their data as seriously as their sales figures, a Nigerian-born revenue strategist and Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Information and Strategy Management (CIISM) has said.

Ifeoma E. Okoli, who helped General Electric release $58 million in trapped revenue during her years with the company, said the artificial intelligence tools now reshaping finance departments in North America and Europe are well within reach of Nigerian firms.

“The tools that help global companies forecast better and collect faster are within reach of Nigerian businesses too,” Ms. Okoli said in an interview. “What matters is the discipline to use data well and to treat every customer as a long-term relationship.”

Ms. Okoli was admitted to the grade of Fellow on 15 August 2025 at the Institute’s induction ceremony at the Nigerian Army Resource Centre, Asokoro, Abuja. The same event saw Ambassador (Dr) Temile Uduogho Oritseweyinmi inaugurated as the first female President of the Institute’s Governing Council.

The fellowship, conferred under the Institute’s by-laws, entitles her to use the designation FCISM and remains valid for as long as her name stays on its register of members. Ahead of the ceremony, the Institute’s Vice President, Prof. Oyeyemi Mathew Olugbenga of the University of Ibadan, told The Guardian that induction was a commitment to excellence rather than a mere formality.
For Ms. Okoli, the honor carries a message beyond her own career. “This fellowship is not just a personal milestone,” she said. “It is a reminder that strategy only matters when it shows up in results. I hope it encourages young Nigerian professionals, especially women, to believe their work can stand on any global stage.”

Her recognition comes as businesses in Nigeria and abroad face growing pressure to turn sales into cash quickly. Ms. Okoli’s specialty is the “order-to-cash” cycle: deciding which customers can safely receive credit, billing them accurately and making sure payment actually arrives.

Ms. Okoli currently works as a Revenue Operations Analyst at a Salesforce development company she joined in January 2025. There, she led a collections overhaul covering more than 200 delinquent accounts, cutting the average time to collect payment from over 90 days to 45 days within six months. AI-driven tools she introduced now save the sales team 13 hours of manual data entry every week.

Forecasting is the other half of her work. She built a predictive cash flow model from historical billing data that has sharpened the company’s working capital forecasts, and her practice of feeding richer data into revenue models has narrowed the gap between forecast and actual results by 19%, giving leadership a clearer view of what is coming in and when.
Ms. Okoli insists that results like these depend as much on people as on technology. “Collections is not about chasing people,” she said. “It is about understanding why a customer is not paying and finding a solution that keeps the relationship alive. When you get that right, the cash follows.”

That approach was tested at General Electric, where Ms. Okoli rose to Lead Revenue Specialist between 2018 and 2023, working across the company’s energy and healthcare businesses, now GE Vernova and GE HealthCare. Managing high-value contract billing across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, she resolved the unbilled disputes behind the $58 million release and cut invoice disputes by 25%. Her team of four billing analysts hit a 95% accuracy target and beat an annual collections target of $110 million by 3.3%, while payment plans she negotiated on difficult accounts worth about $30 million significantly reduced the company’s bad debt reserve.

Stints followed at Toronto Hydro Electric Systems, where she used predictive analytics to flag high-risk accounts and connected struggling customers with financial assistance programs, and at Maersk Logistics, where she used customer health scoring to spot clients at risk of leaving. In 2024, she won the Customer Experience Star Award.

Ms. Okoli holds an MBA and a Bachelor of Science degree and is a member of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA). Over her career, she has issued more than 30,000 invoices and, by her own count, helped collect close to $2 billion.

With her name now on the register of Fellows, Ms. Okoli joins an institute that describes itself as Africa’s largest professional body in information and strategy management.