To celebrate innovation and operational mastery, Adeleke Funmilayo Tunrade has been named the 251st Certified Global Tech Hero by The Connected Awards.
This milestone certification honours a visionary whose twelve‑year journey through telecommunications, banking, and fintech has streamlined complex payment ecosystems and delivered transformative outcomes for businesses and customers. Adeleke’s story is one of relentless pursuit of excellence, where every challenge becomes an opportunity to simplify processes, recover lost revenue, and elevate the human experience behind the technology.
From her beginnings managing billing transformations in telecommunications to her pivotal roles in dispute resolution at leading financial institutions, Adeleke’s impact has been both deep and far‑reaching. She brought a data‑led mindset to each position, fusing technical understanding of payment systems and card‑scheme rules with an instinctive empathy for end users. In her earliest banking roles, she treated every reconciliation discrepancy as a puzzle to be solved, crafting frameworks that resolved disputes with unprecedented speed and built safeguards to prevent future errors. These early successes laid the foundation for a career defined by measurable gains in productivity, risk mitigation, and customer satisfaction.
Her tenure at a pioneering payments startup introduced automated dashboards that shifted teams from reactive firefighting to proactive anomaly detection, slashing dispute resolution times and recovering millions in revenue that had once slipped through the cracks. Yet it was at Flutterwave Solutions Limited that Adeleke’s leadership truly flourished. As Payment Operations Manager, she reimagined end‑to‑end transaction flows, deploying real‑time monitoring tools and dynamic reconciliation engines that ensured each of the millions of daily transactions was processed with surgical precision. This work drove a 60% reduction in chargeback resolution times and set new benchmarks for system reliability.
Elevated to Senior Manager and, most recently, Head of Disputes & Chargeback Operations, Adeleke spearheaded Lean Six Sigma initiatives across the organisation. Under her guidance, the dispute lifecycle was redesigned to align with international card‑scheme mandates, eliminating manual bottlenecks and embedding full auditability. Her automated chargeback tool eradicated manual handling, boosting recovery rates to industry‑leading levels and reducing operational risk costs by 95%. She built robust cross‑functional teams that partnered with fraud, compliance, and engineering units to detect fraud patterns and preempt losses, driving down system errors by 85% and setting a new standard for global payment integrity.
Her innovative creation of a diaspora‑focused remittance platform further underscored her ability to fuse technical acumen with customer‑centric design. By streamlining the SendApp experience, she increased transaction success by 30% and lifted customer satisfaction by 40%, demonstrating how thoughtful process design can bridge the gap between technology and real‑world needs. Across more than ten major card and remittance projects, her leadership in operational transformations delivered up to an 80% boost in efficiency, while recovery of £6 million for payment partners illustrated the tangible value of her strategic vision.
Adeleke’s academic and professional qualifications mirror her commitment to excellence. Armed with a Postgraduate Certificate in Lean Six Sigma from UMass Amherst, a Master’s degree in Management with Project Management distinction from the University of Lincoln, and a Bachelor’s in Economics, she has continuously refined her expertise. Certified as a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, SAP FI Consultant, and Agile Scrum Master, among other distinctions, she exemplifies the ethos of lifelong learning, ensuring her approaches remain at the cutting edge of industry practice.
Commenting on this landmark induction, Qazeem Oladejo, founder of The Connected Awards, remarked, “Adeleke Funmilayo Tunrade embodies the ICAI Model in every sense, her profound Impact on global payment reliability, her broad Contribution across cross‑disciplinary teams, her remarkable Achievements in dispute resolution and revenue recovery, and her Innovative Additions that have redefined operational excellence. Celebrating our 251st Global Tech Hero with her induction reaffirms our mission to honor those whose work transforms technology into better experiences for all.”
As Adeleke Funmilayo Tunrade takes her place among the elite cadre of Global Tech Heroes, her story stands as an inspiration for practitioners and leaders striving to combine human empathy with data‑driven precision. Her induction commemorates a career of extraordinary accomplishments and heralds the promise of continued innovation, proof that the most powerful solutions emerge when technical brilliance and compassionate leadership unite.
