IGBIGI
Building programmable trust for digital transactions.
Digital commerce in Nigeria runs on trust that no system holds. Igbigi was imagined as the missing layer: a place where two strangers can transact and the money is safe until the deal is complete, with escrow, wallets and settlement operating as one piece of infrastructure rather than three disconnected services.
Trust was being improvised. Buyers sent money and hoped. Sellers shipped and hoped. Existing payment rails moved value but carried no obligation, no arbitration and no memory of the parties involved, so every transaction between strangers started from zero and fraud sat in the gap.
The strategic shift was to stop treating escrow as the product. Escrow is one expression of a broader primitive: conditional value transfer between parties who cannot verify one another. Once the system is built around conditions, identity and intelligence rather than around a single escrow flow, the same infrastructure serves peer commerce today, human-to-AI commerce next, and autonomous agent transactions after that. That reframing changed the architecture, the data model and the ambition of the company.
Escrow is not the product. Programmable trust is.
- Wallet
- Deal cards
- Payment links
- Bulk payouts
- Escrow conditions
- Arbitration
- Settlement rules
- Identity signals
- Fraud scoring
- Transaction memory
- NGN transfers
- Crypto infrastructure
- Ledger
Escrow engine with conditional release and dispute arbitration
Multi-currency wallets with NGN and crypto settlement
Payment links and deal cards for transactions initiated outside the app
Bulk payout infrastructure for operational disbursement
Double-entry transaction ledger as the system of record
Identity and fraud intelligence applied at transaction time
Intelligence sits at the moment of transaction rather than in reporting. Identity signals, behavioural history and counterparty patterns are scored before value moves, which is where a fraud decision is still cheap. Manual review is reserved for the narrow band the models cannot settle, and every resolved case becomes training signal for the next one.
The interface had to make a financial guarantee legible to someone transacting on a phone over an unreliable connection. Every screen answers one question: where is my money right now, and what happens next.
₦24M+
Transaction volume processed
1,000+
Users reached during early growth
Igbigi moved real volume between real strangers and held. More importantly, it proved the wider thesis: the constraint on digital commerce is not payment capability, it is trust, and trust can be engineered as infrastructure.
I founded the company and led it. I set the product thesis, architected the transaction and trust system, defined the AI and fraud strategy, directed the technology decisions, and worked directly on the customer experience and the commercial model.
- Escrow
- NGN transactions
- Crypto infrastructure
- Wallets
- Payment links
- Deal cards
- Bulk payouts
- Transaction ledgers
- Fraud prevention
- Identity and transaction intelligence