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 with more than 30 years of experience building and scaling technology companies across Europe and Africa. Having founded over 25 ventures and mentored more than 100 founders, he has spent much of the past two decades operating in East Africa, gaining first-hand insight into the realities of financial inclusion, cross-border payments, and the infrastructure needed to serve emerging markets.
As CEO of Umoja Pay, Ivan leads the company’s strategy, regulatory expansion, investor relations, and commercial partnerships. His focus is simple: build payment infrastructure that makes moving money across borders as effortless as sending a message.
Before founding Umoja, Ivan built businesses across multiple industries, from technology and fintech to aviation and emergency services. That breadth of operational experience continues to shape Umoja’s execution-first culture.
Outside the boardroom, Ivan spent decades as a mountaineer. The experience profoundly influenced his leadership philosophy: prepare relentlessly, adapt when conditions change, and never confuse the destination with the route. That mindset has become a defining principle behind Umoja’s expansion across multiple regulated markets.
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.
