Nigeria's technology market is often defined by its challenges—unreliable infrastructure and a volatile economy among them. Yet Dotun Daniel Adekunle, who serves as both chief operating officer and chief technology officer of OPay, contends that the country's most enduring companies are precisely those engineered to withstand its worst days.

"Stubbornness is a business model in Africa," Adekunle said in a keynote titled "Markets That Refuse to Break," delivered at Moonshot by TechCabal on 28 October. A market as demanding as Nigeria's, he argued, rewards companies that continually adapt to local conditions.

His remarks came shortly after a milestone for the company. On 9 October, OPay filed to list on the New York Stock Exchange. The filing shows revenue of $467.1 million for the first half of 2026, up from $197.5 million a year earlier, with lending overtaking payments as the company's largest business. Nigeria accounted for 89.5% of that revenue, and the filing identifies credit risk and regulation among the principal threats to the business.

Adekunle cited the 2023 cash crunch as a case study. After the naira redesign left Nigerians short of physical cash, transfers surged and bank apps buckled under the load. The number of payments on the NIBSS Instant Payment system jumped 45.5% in February 2023, while their total value fell 5.12%, as Nigerians shifted small, everyday spending onto transfers. OPay, Adekunle said, weathered the episode thanks to its nationwide agent network—a distribution model that pairs digital channels with in-person service points, the kind of infrastructure that does not go dark when an app does.

"You have to adapt to the local environment, or you'll die," he said. "Technology is designed for the local reality."

The company also faced a reputational stress test this year. On 30 August, a fake notice spread online claiming OPay would shut down on 1 September and urging customers to withdraw their money. Some did—a reminder that for a payments company, resilience extends beyond uptime to information itself, since a single false post can move customer behaviour. OPay denied the claim, the Central Bank of Nigeria called it false, and police arrested a woman on 4 September over the post. "When we had the issue, we had to bring the market together because it could be you the next day," Adekunle said. "Resilience cannot be achieved alone."

In his view, markets rarely break companies on their own. "Fragile markets don't break businesses, fragile assumptions do," he said. He identified three assumptions builders should abandon: that they can design for an average day, that technology can stand in for people, and that regulators are opponents. Regulation, he argued, should be treated as a design input—a stance consistent with the credit and regulatory risks his own company's filing names as its principal threats.

Adekunle closed by urging builders to treat the world as their operating system. "If you can survive Nigeria, you can survive the world," he said. "Let's have the courage and conviction to take on the world, because if Nigeria can't break you, the world cannot break you." As OPay's listing process advances, those are the risks against which the resilience he described will be measured.