A coalition of seasoned startup builders, compliance architects, and infrastructure pioneers shaping the future of decentralized liquidity across the African continent.
Ivan Braun is a serial entrepreneur who has launched and scaled multiple startups across three continents and mentored over 100 founders globally. His path to Umoja Pay began not in a boardroom but in Tanzania, where he ran a startup and simultaneously built what became the model for Kilimanjaro’s first modern helicopter rescue service. That operational experience inside East Africa’s financial infrastructure defines his contribution to Umojacoin. His leadership philosophy is shaped equally by entrepreneurship and mountaineering. He started climbing at fifteen and pursued it until 2018. That mountaineering experience taught him that abandoning the mission is not an option, but every plan is negotiable, and that the mountain does not care about your preparation. This translates directly into how he builds companies. The risk calibration of a climber and the systems thinking of a builder, applied together, produce a leadership style that is simultaneously resilient and adaptive. That combination is precisely what a company launching across five regulated markets in a single calendar year requires at the helm.
Akinjobi Simeon brings the financial architecture that a multi-jurisdictional fintech at the pre-seed stage cannot afford to get wrong. As a former executive overseeing multi-billion-dollar financial operations across regulated African industries, he brings full visibility across Umoja Pay’s financial architecture — from the unit economics underpinning, to the capital structure of the pre-seed round, to the treasury management required to maintain UMC Credits float at the agent network level. The conversations that determine whether Umoja Pay’s Beachhead Expansion Doctrine works in practice require a CFO with documented experience at the scale African financial institutions take seriously.
Paul Picasso Oloo leads UmojaPay’s commercial strategy, agent-network growth, merchant acquisition, and market execution. As Chief Commercial & Strategy Officer, he drives FSO deployment, Agent onboarding, user activation, UmojaX coordination, and KPI-led rollout planning. With expertise in Agile Project Management, ITIL-based service delivery, and scalable field operations, Paul builds the trusted human infrastructure connecting UmojaPay to communities, merchants, Agents, and users across Africa.
Bornmathew Nuru holds a Master’s in Finance and is a Certified Public Accountant. He is the designated Money Laundering Reporting Officer for Umojacoin’s Panama operations. Every claim Umoja Pay makes about operating within regulatory frameworks depends on the integrity and credibility of the compliance architecture Bornmathew oversees.
Umoja Pay • Scaling across five regulated markets
