Philips is a digital product leader who is passionate about helping Africa-focused businesses build and scale ultra-successful digital products by aggressively leveraging insights from their users and markets. He has nearly a decade of experience in driving product visions and building innovative products that deliver outsized returns across Cross-border Payments, Fintech, Web3, Capital Markets, Insurance, eCommerce, Banking, HR, and Education.
A Jumia (NYSE: $JMIA) alum, Philips has led Product at TAJBank, The Bulb Africa, Koraplay, and Trium Limited, and is widely recognized for leading the development of Africa's first integrated capital markets distribution platform - NGX Invest, in partnership with the Nigeria Exchange Group (NGX).
He believes in the limitless real-world possibilities of web3 and blockchain, and remains a life-long advocate of ethical blockchain.
Experience: 6 years
Yearly salary: $72,000
Hourly rate: $25
Nationality: 🇳🇬 Nigeria
Residency: 🇳🇬 Nigeria
Experience
Head of Product (contract)
Fincode 2024 - 2024
Fincode is an R&D focused organisation that provides a B2B SaaS platform and infrastructure tools for licensed remittance and cross-border businesses to seamlessly offer their products across multiple FX corridors. Led the revamp of our product strategy resulting in a 20% increase in active B2B customers. Clients include SquareMe, World Remit, Remitly, and TerraPay.
Lead Product Owner (contract)
Koraplay 2022 - 2022
Koraplay is a web3 social platform for creators to live their best lives and get rewarded (in crypto) for doing so. Led a 13-man remotely distributed product team spread across 7 time zones to build and launch the product’s beta version with over 2k signups and 1.5k DAUs in <2 months.
Product Lead
Trium Limited 2022 - 2024
Led a 21-man product team with executive stakeholder reporting, to develop a digital gateway platform - ‘NGX Invest’ to distribute capital market products (Initial Public Offers, Primary Offers, Rights Issues) on the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NGX). NGX Invest is now SEC-approved and has been the platform of choice for tier-1 Nigerian banks (including, FCMB, Zenith, GTCO, and Access Holdings) in raising a combined ~2T NGN (~$1.23M USD) issue size in 2024, with platform revenue of >1.41M NGN (~$906K USD). Leveraged a yearly budget of $200k USD and industry expertise across the Access Corporation <> Coronation Group ecosystem to develop, validate, and transform innovative ideas across Fintech, Web3/Digital Asset, Insurtech, and GovTech into early-stage pretotypes (and eventually Digital Ventures) with long-term platform and ecosystem relevance.
Product Lead
The Bulb Africa 2021 - 2022
Led 3 product teams to manage a portfolio of 8 products spanning FinTech, InvestTech, PropTech, and HRTech.
Senior Product Manager
TAJBank Limited 2020 - 2021
Led the MVP development and launch of a non-interest Buy Now Pay Later smart payment wallet (TAJFinance) as a cross-platform lending product for the bank. Also led the pivot of TAJFinance to a full-service retail lending platform which accounted for 11% of Profit before Tax (PBT) in < 7 months (~176M NGN | ~$426K USD).
Product Operations Manager
JUMIA Group (NYSE: $JMIA) 2018 - 2019
Harnessed user feedback (surveys, interviews & SoMe insights) to learn more about the early subscribers of Jumia Prime, increase product adoption, and reach product-market fit.
Skills
