Selected
Editorial Publications

Rebuilding Africa's Payment Rails from the Ground Up

Legacy interbank systems were processing less than 30% of attempted transactions successfully, costing merchants an estimated $140M annually in failed payments across Nigeria alone.

Redesigned the core transaction routing engine with a fault-tolerant microservices architecture. Introduced real-time retry logic, multi-rail fallback, and an ML-based fraud scoring layer that runs in under 8ms.

Transaction success rate climbed from 31% to 94% within six months of go-live. Monthly processed volume crossed $180M. Onboarded 4,200 merchants in Q1 alone.

Two Decades of Vertical SaaS — Built to Last

Healthcare therapy providers and faith-based nonprofits were running operations on spreadsheets and paper. No affordable, purpose-built software existed for their compliance and billing workflows.

Shipped three focused vertical products: Visitel for therapy management, TurboPAS for provider billing, and Church Servant for ministry operations. Kept the stack lean, the contracts simple, and the support personal.

All three products are in active production after 20+ years. Zero venture capital. Positive cash flow from year two. Customers renew because the software actually fits their work.

Trading Analytics at $Billion Scale

Commodity traders needed real-time position visibility across 14 physical markets simultaneously. Existing tools introduced 4-hour reporting lag — unacceptable during volatile sessions.

Built a streaming position aggregation engine in C++ backed by an Oracle data warehouse. Implemented event-driven P&L recalculation that updated on every trade tick across all markets.

Reporting lag reduced from 4 hours to under 3 minutes. System ran without unplanned downtime for 38 consecutive months. Adopted by three additional trading desks beyond the original scope.

Building Houston's First African-Led IT Training Academy

The mid-90s tech boom created demand for certified IT professionals that traditional universities couldn't meet quickly enough. Houston's minority communities were largely excluded from the opportunity.

Assembled a volunteer faculty of working IT professionals who taught evenings and weekends. Ran a full curriculum — Windows, A+, Networking, MCSE, Visual Basic, PowerBuilder, Oracle, SQL Server. Simultaneously ran a PC assembly and export business to fund operations.

Trained 300+ students, many of whom entered IT careers directly from the program. The export business generated enough cash flow to fund the training arm. Sold both businesses as going concerns in 1999.