International Day of Women & Girls in Science: Sholabomi Tinubu, Fintech Division.

What is your area of expertise?

I work in Fintech, with a specific focus on the African market. My clients include banks, crypto companies and Financial Services platforms that have been founded in Africa or serve the African market. I place roles from director to C-Suite. ?

What excites and motivates you most about the area you work in?

For me, it’s about making an impact in Africa. I work with companies that serve and directly benefit underbanked economies and communities. My skillset, industry insight, languages and cultural understanding put me in a privileged position to support these companies in achieving their goals. I’m determined to leverage that privilege to make a difference.

Tell us about a highlight placement you’ve made recently.

I recently worked with a client to place their CFO in advance of a groundbreaking business-model shift from Financial Services provider to Microfinance bank. This is the first transition of its kind for a company that had already reached unicorn status and was motivated by the company’s mission to serve SMEs and underbanked communities across Africa. Suffice to say that as well as being the company’s talent partner, I’m also a huge fan of their work! The search for their CFO was challenging for a number of reasons, not least the requirement for the person to be approved by the Central Bank of Nigeria. After an exhaustive national and international search, we found someone truly special who has been instrumental in ensuring a successful transition and delivering on the company’s mission.

What are the challenges for women in the industry you serve? What makes you hopeful?

I am lucky to speak to talented female leaders across the continent every day, and there is undoubtedly a cultural magnifier to the societal barriers that women face. The mentality that women are better suited to home life than business life persists more prevalently in Africa than in other areas of the world. The female leaders I speak to experience pressures that their male counterparts do not, such as an expectation that they should retire earlier. There is also a significant pay and equity gap.

However, as with any social barrier, breaking it breeds opportunity. I work with female-founded companies that are providing seed funding, training and education to other female-founded businesses. Increasingly women, and particularly younger women are breaking into positions of power and levelling the playing field for others. I expect to see many more women leaders and female-founded start-ups in the next decade and I’m both hopeful and excited to see the problems they solve by supporting other women.

What did you do before Wenham Carter and how does that experience inform your work?

I grew up first in the US and then in Nigeria, and I know many parts of the African continent well. Living in different places gives you an appreciation and understanding of cultural nuances and business customs, and I find this helps me to build relationships with my clients. Also, many of the companies I now help were household names when I was growing up.

I had a non-conventional start to my career, as I originally moved to the UK to study scriptwriting. Following that passion gave me some incredible experiences. I founded a theatre company while at university, put on several shows in London, and travelled with a production of Claudia Rankine’s The White Card. Scriptwriting is my first love, and I think it’s the love I’ll return to towards the end of my career. I would like to set up a theatre in my hometown of Ikeja. But right now, my focus is wholly on the opportunity that Fintech recruitment has given me to make a difference in the place where I’m from. ?