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A 17‑year‑old Nigerian developer, Abdullah Ajala, has emerged winner of the Nomba x DevCareer Hackathon after beating more than 1,000 participants to claim the top prize of $4,000 with an artificial intelligence‑powered tool designed to help small business owners manage credit sales.
Nomba, in a statement on Tuesday, said Ajala’s winning product, PayWise, is an AI assistant integrated into WhatsApp that enables traders and small business operators to track debts using voice notes in their preferred languages.
The tool allows business owners to record customer debts through voice messages, after which the system logs the information, tracks outstanding balances, sends reminders and updates records when payments are settled.
The hackathon attracted more than 1,000 developers, with 10 participants making the shortlist and three teams eventually emerging as winners.
The five‑week competition featured a main build challenge from 30 June to 7 July, during which developers gained access to Nomba’s full API stack, including checkout, virtual accounts, transfers and webhooks.
Participants competed across two categories, a build track and an infrastructure track, with the challenge focused on creating solutions that could serve real customers rather than experimental prototypes.
“The aim was never to just build something to demo,” Jafer Shariff, vice‑president of product at Nomba, said. “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.”
Nomba said every developer who progressed through the competition delivered a live product, adding that participants were encouraged to continue developing their solutions beyond the hackathon.
Top three winners
Ajala’s PayWise secured the first prize of $4,000, while Glasspot emerged second with a $1,500 prize.
Glasspot is a money‑pooling platform inspired by informal group savings practices in Nigeria, allowing users to contribute funds into a shared pool and access money based on agreed rules, including savings targets, scheduled dates or member approvals.
Third place went to Paye, a payment routing platform designed for developers. The solution allows merchants to connect multiple payment gateways, including Nomba, through a single integration instead of building separate connections with each provider.
Paye enables merchants to switch active payment gateways without changing their code, provision virtual accounts and receive consistent webhook notifications regardless of the provider processing a transaction.
Ajala said the idea behind PayWise came from observing how small business owners in his community managed credit sales using notebooks.
Many traders rely on manual records to track customers who owe money, creating challenges when notebooks are damaged, lost or become difficult to maintain.
PayWise replaces that process with voice‑based recording, allowing traders to capture transactions in the same way they communicate with customers and suppliers.
The decision to build on WhatsApp was deliberate, Ajala said, because small business owners already use the platform for everyday communication.
“That’s where these business owners already are,” he said.
He added that one of the biggest technical challenges was enabling the platform to process voice notes in Nigerian languages, including Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa, while maintaining context, accents and meaning.
Ajala said the experience showed him that developing technology involved more than writing code, as builders also needed to test solutions with real users and validate whether they addressed genuine problems.
Asked what he would improve, Ajala said he would expand the wallet feature of the platform.
“Nomba gave us the same infrastructure their merchants actually run on, the same checkout, the same transfers, the same webhooks, not a version built for a demo, and that’s what forces you to build something that has to hold up the way theirs does,” he said.
Fintech advancement
Pelumi Aboluwarin, co-founder and chief technology officer at Nomba, said the winning product demonstrated the importance of building technology that can withstand real‑world use.
“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.
“Abdullah worked with the same checkout, accounts and webhooks our merchants run on, and still turned voice notes in Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa into something a business owner could track.”
Nomba said the hackathon was designed to encourage developers to build practical solutions using its technology infrastructure while creating a pipeline of innovators for Nigeria’s fintech ecosystem.
The company added that participants received certification, affiliate revenue‑sharing opportunities and continued access to its developer ecosystem.
Nomba said the competition highlighted the growing interest among Nigerian developers in building artificial intelligence and financial technology solutions targeted at solving everyday business challenges
Credit: Punch
