According to the World Bank, over 1.4 billion adults globally remain unbanked, with Sub-Saharan Africa accounting for the largest portion. Meanwhile, cross-border payments, a market exceeding $150 billion, remain plagued by high fees, regulatory friction, and lengthy processing times, costing users in low-income regions both time and money. As remittances grow to form a lifeline for millions of households, the urgency for reliable, affordable, and scalable financial infrastructure has never been greater. Behind every smooth mobile transfer, every real-time wallet settlement, and every payment API is a backend system that must work flawlessly under pressure. And when those systems fail, the ripple effect can paralyse economies, break user trust, and trap funds for vulnerable populations.
In 2023, PayPal, a global payment company with over 432 million accounts, experienced a dramatic two-hour outage due to a backend API failure in its Braintree GraphQL service. The disruption, which began at 10:53 UTC and lasted until 12:59 UTC, disrupted withdrawals, express checkout, cryptocurrency transactions, Venmo, and Xoom services worldwide. During the incident, nearly 9,000 user reports spiked on Downdetector, and users were met with errors like “please check your entries and try again,” unable to access funds or complete transfers. That morning, small business owners couldn’t pay suppliers, gig workers couldn’t receive earnings, and travellers were left stranded, unable to top up cards or withdraw cash, showing how a single point of backend failure can cascade into global trust and financial loss. Although PayPal restored service quickly, the outage highlighted a painful reality: even today’s most advanced financial platforms are only as strong as their backend infrastructure. Failures, even brief ones, can erode user confidence, stall business operations, and expose how interconnected our financial lives have become.
With the world now deeply digital, billions of people rely on online transactions to power everything from daily purchases to cross-border remittances. As a result, financial technology has become the backbone of the global economy, driven by constant innovation, increasing user expectations, and rising demands for speed, reliability, and security. To keep up, software engineers must not only master the tools of today but also anticipate the challenges of tomorrow.
One such engineer is Wisdom Matthew, a Senior Backend Engineer at NALA, who has been instrumental in building the resilient financial infrastructure that powers seamless, real-time payments across borders. From optimising transaction pipelines to safeguarding user data, Wisdom ensures that behind every smooth digital payment is a system designed to scale, adapt, and never miss a beat.
Meet Wisdom Matthew, the Infrastructure Engineer Powering Payments for the Next Billion users across the Global South
Wisdom Matthew is a software engineer building scalable financial infrastructure for global users. With over four years of experience in backend engineering, Wisdom currently works at NALA, a high-growth fintech company solving cross-border payment challenges in Africa and beyond.
Born and raised in Lagos, he began his journey as a self-taught developer and has since contributed to building products that power real-time transactions, optimise cost, and meet strict regulatory standards. His work ensures that financial systems remain secure, resilient, and fast, even at scale.
Wisdom believes that financial systems should be invisible to the user, fast, secure, and always available. To achieve this, engineers must design for failure, build for scale, and think beyond code. For him, software engineering is not just about writing functions; it’s about solving real-world problems with precision, empathy, and accountability.
The stakes behind that belief are high.
According to a 2024 New Relic report on observability in the financial services sector, high-impact outages cost firms an average of $2.2 million per hour. Nearly half (48%) of financial organisations report significant outages every week, issues that ripple across regulation, revenue, and reputation. Splunk’s “Hidden Costs of Downtime” study underscores the magnitude, revealing that Global 2000 financial firms lose a staggering $152 million annually, with nearly a quarter of that stemming from lost revenue and another $22 million from regulatory fines. In short, downtime is not just inconvenient; it is crippling.
Where Wisdom Makes the Difference
This is precisely where engineers of Wisdom’s calibre step in. With a proven track record of safeguarding complex financial systems, he has built a reputation for turning potential crises into seamless recoveries. Make no mistake, this responsibility is immense, often weighing as heavily as hundreds of millions in annual transactions are at risk if something goes wrong. Yet, time and again, he delivers by building reliable, scalable systems that underpin the trust of entire financial ecosystems.
Wisdom’s impact extends far beyond his professional role. On the global stage, he shares his expertise at premier developer conferences such as FlutterBytes and Conf42, shaping conversations that define the future of reliability engineering. His contributions to leading open-source projects, including OpenTelemetry and Couper, have strengthened the very foundations on which modern observability and resilience practices are built. Through mentorship, he has guided the next generation of fintech engineers, instilling in them not only technical mastery but also a commitment to excellence and community.
For Wisdom, reliability is not just a discipline; it is a mission. By equipping engineers worldwide with the mindset and tools to succeed, he is ensuring that the financial infrastructure of tomorrow will be more resilient, inclusive, and ready to scale. His work is not simply about preventing outages; it is about building confidence in a world where every second counts and every failure carries weighty consequences.
