The engineer who made rival banks share one rail

A debit card that will not work at another bank's machine is not a small annoyance. It is a broken market.

Lagos, 2002. Mitchell Elegbe, a University of Benin engineer, started Interswitch to build the bridge no bank would build alone: a neutral switching layer every rival institution could route through and trust.

The decision that mattered: make the switch shared infrastructure, not a competitive weapon. Convincing competitors to cooperate was harder than the engineering.

The Global South's founders treat interoperability as the product, not the afterthought.

Source: Interswitch; Billionaires Africa, 2024.