An engineer, Oyegoke Oyebode, has said that engineering is the future of digital trust, according to the rules of Artificial Intelligence (AI), blockchain and governance.

When payments fail, the impact is immediate: a card declined at checkout, an outage stalling millions of transactions, or a breach exposing sensitive data, but for Oyebode, failures like these don’t just disrupt commerce, they corrode trust.

“In payments, speed is meaningless if the system cannot be trusted,” said Oyebode, who is an engineer at Visa.

“The question is not simply whether it works, it is whether billions of people can rely on it, every single time.”

Long before Visa put you in charge of programs worth over $25 million, you worked in Jos, Xerox, T-Mobile, and SAP. What did those chapters teach you?

Oyebode: “What stood out across those places wasn’t just the problems, but the patterns beneath them. In Jos, the challenge wasn’t a lack of equipment but a lack of visibility. Data existed, but it wasn’t being used to guide decisions. That’s where I first understood that intelligence—whether human or artificialonly matters when it’s embedded directly into the flow of operations, not layered on afterward.

“Xerox presented the opposite challenge: precision at scale. We worked on predictive and automated frameworks where AI was used less as a buzzword and more as a control mechanism—detecting anomalies, surfacing patterns, anticipating failures. It wasn’t about replacing people; it was about stabilizing systems before problems cascaded.

“At T-Mobile, the lesson was responsiveness. AI had to operate in real time, parsing streams of signals measured in milliseconds. At SAP, the emphasis was different again: embedding intelligence so deeply into enterprise software that it became invisible. The user doesn’t think of it as AI, but the decisions they make and the efficiency they see are quietly shaped by it.

“Taken together, those experiences showed me that governance, resilience, and intelligence are not separate layers. They’re properties of the same architecture—and when designed well, AI becomes less about algorithms and more about trust in how the system behaves.”

Analysts once called tokenization a quiet revolution. Why?

Oyebode: “Because it changed the nature of the attack surface. In the traditional model, every transaction carried sensitive data—account numbers, expiry dates, CVVs. With tokenization, those identifiers are replaced with cryptographic surrogates. Even if intercepted, they’re meaningless.
The deeper shift was architectural. Security stopped being an afterthought and became part of the transaction lifecycle itself—enrollment, checkout, authorization. That’s why it felt less like an upgrade and more like a redefinition.”

Where does AI actually move the needle in payments?

Oyebode: “Payments are sequences of trust decisions. Enrollment: is this identity real? Checkout: is this transaction legitimate? Authorization: should the bank approve?
We use a range of models—gradient-boosted trees, neural networks, anomaly detectors—processing hundreds of signals in milliseconds: device fingerprints, behavioral patterns, velocity checks.

“The challenge isn’t detection alone—it’s balance. Fraud must be stopped, but legitimate customers can’t be blocked. Embedding AI into the rails allows both: intelligence that reduces risk while preserving flow.”

Resilience and governance often sound like separate issues. How do you see them working together?

Oyebode: “For me, they’re inseparable. You don’t design to avoid failure—you design for recovery. Active-active data centers, automated failover, continuous rollback testing. In payments, Mean Time to Recovery is as important as throughput. Minutes of downtime ripple into billions, so resilience isn’t optional—it’s existential.

“But resilience without governance is fragile. Too many organizations build first and then scramble to meet compliance. That’s backwards. We try to invert it—embedding PCI-DSS, SOX, and ISO checks directly into pipelines, validating deployments automatically, even using governance bots to reduce manual reporting. Governance, in that sense, isn’t the brake pedal. It’s the scaffolding that lets you build higher without collapse.”

After securing card data, what’s the real next frontier—and why should Nigeria care?

Oyebode: “The next step is tokenizing fiat itself. At Visa, I worked with colleagues across engineering, security, and compliance to build the infrastructure that allows financial institutions to issue fiat-backed tokens on blockchain networks. As program manager, my role was to ensure the pieces connected—governance, scale, resiliency—so innovation didn’t outpace trust.

“Ethereum is often the proving ground since it already supports smart contracts. But unlike private stablecoins, these tokens are issued under regulated frameworks, backed one-to-one by fiat reserves, and designed to interoperate with existing rails. Together, we weren’t chasing hype—we were merging fiat’s stability with blockchain’s programmability.

“Stablecoins already showed the demand—people want value they can move natively on-chain. But they also revealed governance gaps: reserves weren’t always transparent, audits were inconsistent, compliance was thin. Nigeria’s eNaira reflects a similar tension. The vision was right, but adoption has struggled with outages, fraud concerns, and weak integration into daily commerce.

“Fiat tokenization under disciplined governance could offer another path. Imagine Nigeria’s $20 billion in annual remittances settling in minutes instead of days. Or local trade flows where smart contracts automatically release payments once conditions are met. The point isn’t blockchain for its own sake—it’s about solving practical trust problems at scale.”

But doesn’t putting fiat on blockchain just create new risks?

Oyebode: “It does, which is why the governance model matters. You don’t scale live funds immediately. You start in non-value sandboxes, testing issuance and flows under controlled conditions. Auditability, compliance, and rollback are built in from the start. The difference is between pilots that make headlines and systems people actually rely on.”

Five years from now, what defines success?

Oyebode: “That we stop asking, ‘Does it work?’ and start asking, ‘Is it trusted at scale?’ AI, blockchain, tokenization—they’re all secondary to that. The systems that endure won’t just be fast. They’ll be dependable, interpretable, and resilient.

“For Nigeria, that’s the real opportunity. Success won’t come from chasing hype or replicating what others have done, but from embedding trust into the very foundations of its digital economy. Governance must be built in from the start, resilience engineered for recovery in seconds, and tokenization pursued with transparency and discipline. If Nigeria gets trust right, it won’t just catch up—it can set the global standard for the future of digital payments.”