Writing from the AutoPay team on building fintech in Nigeria, recurring payment infrastructure, and the experience of starting a company in Port Harcourt.
Standing orders in Nigeria are supposed to automate recurring payments. In practice, they fail silently, don't work across banks, and give you zero visibility when something goes wrong. Here's a technical breakdown of the problem and how AutoPay approaches it differently.
A plain-English explanation of the mandate flow — what happens when you authorise a schedule, why ₦50 is charged, and how the backend executes the actual debit on due date.
A technical walkthrough of AutoPay's data model. BVN as a hash, AES-256-GCM on account numbers, and why we never see your raw bank credentials even when executing payments on your behalf.
Most Nigerian fintech is built in Lagos. We're doing it in Port Harcourt. Here's an honest account of what that means for recruiting, banking partnerships, and finding early users.
Most people see the UI. The real product is the job scheduler underneath it. A deep dive into how BullMQ, Redis, and idempotency keys make payment scheduling reliable at scale.
We launched AutoPay's private beta before registering with the CAC — and that was intentional. Here's why early validation matters more than incorporation, and how we thought about the regulatory risk.
We integrated both Mono and Okra as fallback open banking providers. Here's an honest comparison of their coverage, reliability, API quality, and support responsiveness based on real usage.