Fintech solved the wrong problem. London is where we fix it

Global mobility is a fact of modern life, from the 1.5 billion tourists who travel abroad every year to the 304 million people who call a different country home. Take me: I am an American who has spent the last 20 years living in Oslo. I met my wife studying abroad, moved to Norway, built my career there, and eventually helped build a company that now serves more than two million people across 30 countries. My life, like the lives of the customers we serve at LemFi, has always crossed borders. It is the whole foundation of what we’re building.

Prior to Ridwan Olalere and me starting LemFi, we kept coming back to the same problem: that when people move countries, their financial lives reset to zero. Despite years of progress in financial technology, nobody had seriously tried to solve it.

What two decades in emerging markets taught me

Before LemFi, I spent years at Opera Software, the Norwegian browser company, as it transformed from a consumer tech business into one of the largest financial services platforms in Africa, serving 350 million users across emerging markets. What we learned, operating across Nigeria and beyond, is that technology alone does not build financial trust. You need local knowledge, regulatory credibility and a genuine understanding of how people actually use money under real conditions.

That experience shaped my thinking in ways I still draw on today. In markets like Nigeria, the barriers to building a product are low. What is hard is retaining users when the next competitor can offer the same thing for less. Price sensitivity is fierce, differentiation is difficult and building a sustainable business requires something more than a good product.

It also clarified where the deeper, more solvable gap actually was. In emerging markets, the challenge is infrastructure. In developed markets, it is invisibility, and invisibility turned out to be a problem we were better placed to tackle.

The smarter bet: serving people the system ignores

When people move from Nigeria to the UK, from India to Canada, from the Philippines to the US, they bring with them years of financial behaviour that counts for nothing. Responsible borrowers become credit invisible and reliable earners cannot rent a flat. The system was simply never built for people whose lives span borders, so it fails to recognise them even when their financial behaviour is entirely sound.

This is where LemFi found its footing. Immigrants in developed markets are looking for services they can trust, products that understand their lives and a financial partner that grows with them over time. Remittance opens the relationship, but credit, savings, payments and financial identity are what sustain it and those are the services that create something genuinely durable.

Our acquisition of London-based credit fintech Pillar last year was an expression of this thinking. We are building the infrastructure to extend credit to people who are creditworthy but invisible to traditional lenders, using transaction data, open banking and international financial history to build a fuller picture of who someone actually is.

Why London, and why now

Recently, we announced a £100 million investment in the UK and the establishment of our global headquarters in London. For a company of our size, that is a significant commitment, but it was one we needed to make. 

London sits at the centre of the corridors we serve. The UK-Nigeria relationship alone represents £8.1 billion in bilateral trade annually. Add India, Pakistan, Kenya and beyond, and London becomes less a convenient location and more a natural centre of gravity for everything we are building.

The UK also offers the regulatory environment and capital access that allow us to build responsibly at scale. We now hold licences across 14 US states, Ireland, Australia, Canada and London, which gives us the foundation to connect all of that into something coherent. The investment will go into research and development, compliance and infrastructure and we are on track to more than double our UK team to 150 people by the end of 2026.

The work that actually matters

Fintech spent a decade building better experiences for people already inside the financial system, and that work genuinely mattered. What it did not do was reach the more than 300 million people who live outside their country of birth, whose financial histories disappear when they cross a border and who deserve services that move with them. 

That is what we are building in London and it is the most important work we have done.

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