Austine Abolusoro is the Founder and CEO of P2Vest Technology Limited, a financial technology company offering peer-to-peer platforms for lending and insurance. Based in Lagos, Nigeria, this founder and CEO successfully launched his company at the very start of the pandemic, leveraging a long career in technology, banking, and digital transformation to build a growing suite of products that serves more than 300,000 users.
Prior to starting P2Vest, Austine held several positions at top tier banks in Nigeria, including his most recent role as the Group Head for Online Banking at United Bank for Africa Plc, where he played an integral role on the digital transformation team for the bank.
“I had taken executive education courses before, including at Harvard, but I always aspired to experience MIT's unique approach," says Austine. "The timing felt right, especially as I was championing an ongoing artificial intelligence project in the bank. So, my first run at MIT was Artificial Intelligence: Implications for Business Strategy.”
The experience in this course inspired him to pursue an Executive Certificate in Digital Business, a goal he completed in late 2023.
"I had taken executive education courses before... but I always aspired to experience MIT's unique approach."
The project Austine was managing at the time at the United Bank for Africa Plc included the creation of sophisticated chat bots banking customers used to open accounts, get self-help, or interact with customer service agents. This was several years before generative AI tools like ChatGPT were widely available. Their products were mentioned in Mark Zuckerberg’s opening speech at the 2018 F8 conference in San Francisco, and ultimately their technology resulted in successful partnerships with Facebook and WhatsApp.
And yet, despite all his success at the bank, Austine couldn’t quite shake the growing desire to start his own venture. “I did know for certain that I should be running my own company,” he says. “And I had a long career at and very close ties to the bank—it was a place I loved to be.” It would take some time before he made the leap.
However, a nearly three-year stint at Heirs Holdings, an investment company funded by the chairman of the United Bank for Africa, provided him the opportunity to setup and manage technology used at the Tony Elumelu Entrepreneurship Program that selected and supported entrepreneurs from across Africa. It was during this time that Austine officially caught the founder bug. After returning to the banking world for two more years to manage AI projects and significant digital transformation efforts, Austine felt ready to make the move in 2020—just in time for a global pandemic.
“In mid 2019, I was the group head of Online Digital Banking, overseeing 20 digital banking heads across Africa. It was a particularly busy period, but I felt a strong pull towards pursuing my entrepreneurial dream. I convinced management that I needed to start my own company in 2020 and provided them with six months' notice. During this period, the COVID-19 pandemic emerged, but my decision was already made.”
Austine decided to use the lockdown to lean into the technology trends he was following, blockchain and cryptocurrencies in particular. During this time he enrolled in Blockchain Technologies: Business Innovation and Application at MIT.
“I was also ideating around my business and putting together my team at this time, but the course was self-paced, so it worked well.”
Eventually, Austine enrolled in Maximizing Your Personal Productivity: How to Become an Efficient and Effective Executive and completed his certificate with Data-Driven Teams: The Art and Science of Winning. He credits these two courses with having an enormous impact on his work.
In Maximizing Your Personal Productivity, Austine learned valuable lessons about time management that continue to serve him well, from delegating better and more frequently to enabling his team to be more productive in meetings. “I'm still practicing these things and improving the way I allocate time.” The in-depth conversations about remote work during the course also resonated with Austine, who had been envisioning a hybrid model and continues to uphold that model currently.
His takeaways from Data Driven Teams were also substantial.
“This course was very important for me … it was a training I attended in person and that is really focused on how you can drive performance in a team, measure that performance, and reward it. P2Vest is a small company of just about 25 people—I need to ensure that they are performing at a high level. But regardless of the size or type of company, in most cases, the parameters we use to assess our teams are insufficient. We don’t have enough of the right kind of data. But we learned there are certain questions to ask that can provide alternative data that you can use to score an individual, particularly when you have difficult parameters. Participants share their own experiences and what has worked for them. I took away many things that I continue to implement.”
Austine also commented that while online courses are convenient, his experience on campus was particularly special. “Sitting down with people, having conversations in breakout groups, it was all fantastic. And the learning was always practice oriented—what matters is how you apply these things you are learning. I met so many people, and today we are all connected on LinkedIn.”
Austine’s company started with an MVP product that offers peer-to-peer lending. Their app is available on iOS and the Google Play Store, and to date they have over 500,000 downloads and ~300,000 signups on their platform. More recently, they developed an insurance marketplace and have partnered with 15 insurance companies. They have also developed an API on behalf of these insurance companies through which FinTechs and other players in the ecosystem can connect.
“We are focused on scaling and expanding the range of offerings available to our customers. The insights and strategies gained from MIT have been invaluable, and we are actively implementing them to enhance our services."