Top Inspiring Business Leaders of Excellence Driving Nigeria’s Economic growth: Interswitch Group

To Celebrate Inspiring business leaders of Excellence driving Nigeria’s Economic growth Chioma kachi Ewelike sat with the professional par excellence in person of Dr. Cherry Eromosele the Executive Vice President & Group Chief and Communications Officer of Interswitch to discuss business so far. Tell us about what inspired the creation of Interswitch and how has this Vision evolved over time.When people ask about Interswitch and what inspired our creation, I often say: we were born out of a simple but urgent question “Why should moving money digitally – and getting access to money just-in-time from the bank be so hard in Nigeria?” Back in 2002, our founder who remains Group CEO today, Mitchell Elegbe, saw firsthand how fragmented, cash-heavy and exclusionary the payment landscape was.

People wasted hours in queues, businesses struggled to collect and reconcile payments, and the promise of a truly connected African economy seemed distant. Interswitch emerged as a bold response: to build the rails that would move value as seamlessly and reliably as information travels across a network. At the heart of that decision was not technology for its own sake, but a deep conviction that if we could connect people to their money in smarter ways, we would unlock opportunity at scale, transforming how we live, work, trade and thrive.

Over the years, we’ve moved from enabling ATM and card transactions to powering a broad digital commerce ecosystem: across payments, Verve, Quickteller, and our enterprise solutions, serving individuals, SMEs, large corporations, and governments. The ambition has also grown beyond Nigeria, into a pan-African vision: to help build a truly interoperable, inclusive payment fabric for the continent. What remains constant is our obsession with impact.

Today, we’re not just asking how to process the next transaction faster; we’re asking how to create the next million entrepreneurs, how to power the next wave of African innovation, and how to make digital payments so intuitive and ubiquitous that they quietly enable progress in the background of everyday life. Interswitch started as an answer to a pain point. It has become a platform for possibility—and we are still at the beginning of what Africa can achieve when its payment infrastructure is not a barrier, but a catalyst for growth 2.

What do you believe sets Interswitch apart from other payme…