How a five time founder from Ilorin built the first financial AI in Nigeria that listens, speaks, and works for all types of people, including SMEs, startup founders, students, busy people, and people with disabilities
There is a woman at Oja Tuntun market in Ilorin who has kept the same exercise book for 6+ years. The cover is gone. Half the pages have come loose from the spine. Some entries are smudged beyond reading. She still writes in it every day because it is the only system she has ever trusted with her money.
I think about her every time someone asks me why I built Floww Finance.
The Curse That Wasn’t a Curse
Growing up, I noticed something that never sat right with me. A business owner would take a loan, work brutally hard to pay it back, and within months of the final payment, the business would quietly close. It happened often enough that people in my community gave it a name.
They called it “Cursed Money.”
I didn’t believe that too well. I believed in patterns. And when I went on to study Economics at the University of Ilorin, I finally had a lens sharp enough to see what was actually happening. It wasn’t spiritual. It was structural. Every single one of these businesses had one thing in common: no financial records. They were borrowing money, running entirely on instinct, and by the time the loan repayment ended, they had no idea whether the business had ever actually been profitable in the first place. The “curse” was just the absence of a number.
That observation sat with me for years, through five different ventures, through a career as a product designer and software architect, through a role leading design at the Ilorin Innovation Hub. I kept circling back to it. And eventually, I stopped circling and started building.
The First Attempt Failed, and It Should Have
My first instinct was to build an inventory management system. I was proud of it. I brought it to real business owners, starting with my own parents, my aunt’s shop, and traders I’d known my whole life. Almost every single one of them rejected it on sight.
I was asking a woman who sells over 2,000 different products in her store to first catalogue every single item before she could even begin tracking anything. That wasn’t a solution. That was homework disguised as software, and I had built it the way an engineer builds things, not the way a person who has never had time to sit down and type actually lives.
So I stopped building, and I started listening.
What I Found When I Actually Paid Attention
I spent real time at Oja Tuntun, at my parents’ shop, at my aunt’s store, watching how people actually managed money when nobody was trying to sell them a product. And I found something I had completely missed the first time around.
These traders were already financial record keepers. They had been journaling in exercise books for years, sometimes decades. The habit already existed. The discipline already existed. What kept failing them was the medium, pages that tore, ink that faded, books that got left in the rain or lost entirely, and math that had to be redone from a calculator at the end of every exhausting day.
And every single one of them had a smartphone. Every single one of them already sent voice notes on WhatsApp without a second thought because talking has always been easier than typing, and speaking your own language has always been easier than typing in someone else’s.
That was the moment I understood what Floww Finance actually needed to be. Not a smarter spreadsheet. Not a friendlier form. A financial companion that meets people exactly where their existing habits already are.
Building Something That Listens First
Floww Finance connects directly to a user’s bank account and captures every transaction automatically, so the books start building themselves the moment someone signs up. No manual entry required. But the piece that actually changes lives is Keji, our AI assistant.
You speak to Keji the way you’d speak to a person standing next to you. In Yoruba. In Igbo. In Hausa. In Pidgin. In English. You don’t adjust your language for the machine. The machine adjusts to you. Say a sentence about what you sold today and what you spent on supplies, and Keji understands it, separates it, and logs it correctly and automatically, without you touching a keyboard.
That alone would have been enough to call it a meaningful product. But somewhere in building it, we realized we were sitting on something bigger than convenience.
The Realization That Changed the Mission
If a person can build their entire business’s financial record by speaking, and the app can understand them regardless of literacy level, then the same design that serves a busy trader in the middle of a market also serves someone who cannot see a screen at all.
We didn’t add accessibility to Floww Finance as an afterthought. We built toward it once we understood it was already inside the design. Keji doesn’t just listen anymore. Keji replies back in voice, in the same language the user spoke in. Every button, every interaction, every corner of the interface now carries proper accessibility labelling, so a visually impaired entrepreneur can run their entire bookkeeping process by ear, start to finish, with nothing lost in translation between what the screen shows and what the person can actually perceive.
I think about this constantly: there are business owners in Nigeria today who are blind or living with low vision, who have built real, working, income generating businesses, and who have never had a single financial tool designed with them in the room. Not as an edge case. Not as a “nice to have.” In the room, from the beginning, the way we built Keji’s voice first architecture from day one.
That is not a feature. That is a correction of an oversight the entire fintech industry has quietly accepted for years.
None of this happened in a boardroom. It happened by going back, again and again, to Oja Tuntun, to my parents’ shop, to the people the entire tech industry keeps building around instead of building for.
Why This Matters Beyond Floww Finance
I don’t think financial exclusion in Nigeria is a technology problem. I think it’s an empathy problem that technology happens to be capable of solving if the people building the technology are willing to actually sit down and listen first.
The woman with the six year old exercise book at Oja Tuntun doesn’t need to be taught how to use a smartphone. She already owns one. She doesn’t need to learn a new habit. She already has the habit. She needs a tool that finally shows up in the form her life already takes, spoken, not typed; heard, not read; built for her exactly as she is, not as software has always assumed she should be.
That is what Floww Finance is trying to be. Not the smartest app in the room. Just the one that finally listens and takes financial inclusion #BeyondTheBox.
Darey Oloye is the founder of Floww Finance, an AI powered bookkeeping platform built for startups, the informal economy, including the millions of traders, small business owners, and visually impaired entrepreneurs who have never had a financial tool designed for how they actually live. Floww Finance is live now on the App Store and Google Play Store.
Learn more at flowws.finance
