Mitchell Elegbe

Mitchell Elegbe Olusegun was born on 14 November 1973 in Benin City, Edo State, Nigeria, and graduated with an Electrical/Electronic Engineering degree from the University of Benin before beginning his career as a Wireline Engineer at Schlumberger and later in business development at Telnet.

While working at Telnet, Elegbe recognised a critical gap in Nigeria's financial infrastructure: there were no ATMs in the country, and ordinary Nigerians faced long, stressful journeys to physically visit banks for basic transactions.

Unable to secure the funding to hire an experienced CEO to lead his idea, Elegbe founded Interswitch himself in 2002, building the switching infrastructure that enabled electronic transactions to scale across Nigeria for the first time, just four years after completing his mandatory National Youth Service.

Under Elegbe's leadership, Interswitch grew into Nigeria's dominant digital payments company, launching Verve, an indigenous card payment scheme used across Africa, and expanding into new markets while diversifying its services across banking, e-commerce and government payments.

Elegbe has been named EY Entrepreneur of the Year for West Africa and the 2019 African Banker Icon, and is a Bishop Desmond Tutu Fellow of the African Leadership Institute; under his continued leadership, Interswitch has been valued at over a billion dollars, making it one of Africa's earliest fintech unicorns.