Nomba awards $4,000 to teenage developer for AI credit tracking tool
Nigerian payments company Nomba awarded a 17-year-old developer $4,000 for an artificial intelligence tool that digitizes credit tracking for small businesses, highlighting the growing integration of advanced technology into the country's informal economy.
Nomba, a Nigerian payments company, awarded a $4,000 grand prize to a 17-year-old developer for creating an artificial intelligence tool designed to help small businesses manage credit sales. Abdullah Ajala won the inaugural Nomba x DevCareer Hackathon with PayWise, a solution that allows traders to record customer debts using WhatsApp voice notes.
The innovation targets the informal retail sector, where merchants traditionally rely on paper notebooks to track credit, leaving them vulnerable to lost records and financial losses. By embedding the AI assistant within WhatsApp and supporting English, Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa, the tool leverages a platform already ubiquitous among Nigerian small businesses.
Ajala noted that the primary technical hurdle was not the messaging integration, but training the AI to accurately convert local language voice notes into usable text. "The harder part of the build was not the WhatsApp integration but getting voice notes in Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa to convert into text the AI could work with," he said.
The five-week competition, which ran from June 30 to July 7, attracted over 1,000 developers aiming to build commercially viable financial technology solutions. Participants were given access to Nomba’s production application programming interfaces, including checkout, virtual accounts, and webhooks, rather than simplified demonstration environments.
Pelumi Aboluwarin, Nomba’s co-founder and chief technology officer, emphasized that the company opened its infrastructure to spur external innovation. "What separates a hackathon build from something you’d trust with real money is whether it survives the same scrutiny we put our own systems through, and PayWise did," Aboluwarin said.
Jafer Shariff, Nomba’s vice president of product, stated the objective was to move beyond mere prototypes. “The aim was to ship something live, something customers can actually use and enjoy, and maybe something that becomes the foundation of a business for the developers themselves,” Shariff said.
The competition also recognized solutions addressing other gaps in the local financial ecosystem. Glasspot secured second place and $1,500 for a digital savings platform modeled on informal cooperative schemes, while Paye took third place and $1,000 for a payment orchestration platform that routes transactions across multiple providers like OPay, Paystack, and Flutterwave.
This hackathon is part of a wider strategy by Nomba to expand its developer ecosystem through certifications and affiliate incentives. By supporting promising fintech products post-competition, the payments firm aims to drive broader adoption of its commercial infrastructure across the market.
