The engineer who could not read the account number on the wall, so he taught his phone to read it for him
Osogbo, Nigeria · Sulaiman Adewale
Published August 3, 2026
Sulaiman Adewale sometimes walked out of a shop without buying anything, because the account number posted on the wall was a blur. The workaround he built for his own eyes now runs inside tens of thousands of Nigerians' chats.
The story
The person and the place
Sulaiman Adewale is a software engineer from Osogbo, in southwestern Nigeria. He has been writing code since 2010 and taught himself most of it, not out of principle but because university was not affordable, so he went to technical college instead. "I'm a very dogged person," he told Techpoint Africa. "I could have gone to secondary school like my peers, but I wanted hands-on learning, and I really wanted to learn about computers. From Technical College Osogbo, I proceeded to school myself."
The problem Sulaiman cared about
In Nigeria, paying often means reading a bank account number off a sign taped to the wall behind the counter and typing it into your phone. Adewale cannot see well at a distance. "I have issues seeing things that are far," he has said. "Whenever I go to buy stuff at the supermarket, I sometimes have to leave because I wouldn't be able to see the account number. Even when I see it, it's hard looking up and down multiple times because most of the numbers are blurry." The everyday transaction everyone else completed without thinking was, for him, a reason to put the shopping down and go home.
The agency moment
Instead of squinting harder, he built something that could do the looking. Point a phone camera at the number on the wall, and the thing he built reads it and sends the money. He and his team put it inside WhatsApp rather than making anyone install anything, which was a deliberate choice about who would be able to use it. "I wanted an easier way that carries everybody along in banking, and if you look at it properly, you will see that WhatsApp is what even the oldest people among us use," he told TechCabal.
What changed
TechCabal's reporters used it themselves for two weeks. It handled transactions from photographs, voice notes, and typed messages, analysed spending, scheduled payments, remembered past conversations, and saved recipients for next time. It was trained on accented Nigerian speech and works in Pidgin as well as English, with Hausa and Yoruba on the way. By its first anniversary the company reported around 50,000 users and roughly ten billion naira moved, about six million dollars. It is not a bank. It runs on partner banks' licences and holds nobody's money. Early on, a payment partner could not handle the rush and new sign-ups had to be paused. And the thing users keep raising is trust. "Being able to bank via WhatsApp without opening another app is convenient, since it works even on a low network connection," one early user, Babatunde Hassan, told TechCabal. "But I'm worried about how our information is secured, and I'm sure that doubt may also hold other people back."
The move worth copying
He did not set out to fix financial inclusion in Nigeria. He set out to buy groceries without giving up. The problem in front of your own face is allowed to be the one you work on, and it is often the one you understand well enough to actually solve. What is the thing you have quietly worked around for years? Know someone who built their own way past it? Feed the scout at goodinprogress.org.
"I wanted an easier way that carries everybody along in banking, and if you look at it properly, you will see that WhatsApp is what even the oldest people among us use." — Sulaiman Adewale, TechCabal
Verified sources
Sources
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Sources last verified August 3, 2026.