Omolara Dada is a senior product marketing manager at Busha, a Nigerian digital asset exchange, where she is building the business-to-business (B2B) marketing function from the ground up. With over six years of experience in African fintech, she has worked previously at Anchor, a Y Combinator-backed Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) platform, and Earnipay, an earned wage access (EWA) product, leading go-to-market strategy, product positioning, and growth across B2B and consumer-facing financial products. Her work sits at the intersection of complex financial infrastructure and the human beings who need it explained clearly enough to act on it.

Beyond her day job, Dada is a career coach and content creator building a platform for mid and senior professionals across Nigeria and beyond. She creates content around salary negotiation, career visibility, and the unspoken rules of navigating corporate life, drawing an audience of over 14,000 professionals across Instagram and LinkedIn. 

• Explain your job to a five-year-old.

You know when you make something really cool but nobody knows about it? My job is to help people find out about cool things, understand why it’s useful, and want to use it. I work for a company that helps businesses move money, and I make sure the right people know we exist and understand how we can help them.

• What’s the hardest part about working in fintech in Nigeria?

Trust, and how hard it is to earn, how easy it is to lose. You’re often asking businesses to move their money in a new way, through a newer company, in an environment where people have been burned before and where the economy itself is unpredictable. That means the bar for proof is high. It’s not enough to be clever or well-designed. You have to be credible, consistent, and genuinely reliable before anyone hands you something as sensitive as their money. This also makes the work meaningful because when a business trusts you, you know you earned it.

• You’ve moved from traditional fintech into digital asset finance (crypto). What are the similarities operationally, and where do the complications arise?

The similarities are bigger than people think. At its core, both are about moving money and building trust while you do it. The fundamentals of good marketing, clear positioning, and understanding your customer’s real problem don’t change whether you’re marketing a payments API or a stablecoin product.

The complications come from two places. First, education: with digital assets, you’re often explaining the category itself before you can explain your product. People understand what a bank transfer is. They don’t always understand what a stablecoin is, so you carry a heavier teaching burden. Second, regulation and perception. The space moves fast, the rules are still forming, and there’s a lot of noise and skepticism to cut through. You spend a lot of energy separating the real, useful infrastructure from the speculation people associate with crypto.

• What’s the first thing you had to figure out with no playbook, building Busha’s B2B marketing from scratch?

Who exactly we were talking to. When you’re the first B2B marketing hire, nothing is pre-defined. So the very first thing was getting brutally clear on who the customer actually is, what problem we solve for them that they genuinely care about, and how to say it in a way that resonated with them. Everything else- the content, the channels, the campaigns comes after getting that clarity. I spent my early weeks asking a lot of questions.

• What’s the most common mistake you see people, especially early-stage professionals, make when negotiating salary?

Accepting the first offer. Saying thank you and signing on the spot, as though the number they were given is fixed and final. It rarely is. Most employers build room into that first offer and wait to see if you know that. Early-stage professionals often don’t; they’re so relieved to be chosen that negotiating feels ungrateful, even greedy. But you’re allowed to take a day. You’re allowed to ask if there’s flexibility. You’re allowed to counter. The people who do this, calmly and professionally, earn significantly more over a career than people who are equally talented but stay silent. Your silence is expensive. It just doesn’t send you an invoice.

• What’s one skill you’re interested in but not great at, and another you’re great at but not interested in? 

Interested in but not great at data analytics. I work in a world where numbers drive every decision, and I can read and use data, but I’d love to be genuinely fluent in it,  pulling my own insights without needing to ask. It’s actually why I’m doing a data course this year.

Great at but not interested in: I’m good at the highly detailed, administrative side of getting things over the line. The trackers, the follow-ups, the operational tidiness. I can do it well because I’ve had to, but it doesn’t really excite me.