OnePurze aims to become Nigeria’s ultimate digital wallet

There is a particular kind of anger that comes from watching someone you love get robbed, and nobody does anything about it.

In 2023, a mother checked her bank account and found that money had gone missing. Not stolen at gunpoint, not lost, just gone, the way money sometimes disappears in Nigeria when a bank cannot explain itself. She went to the branch and went back again. The staff were polite, the queues were long, but the answers never came.

That experience became a company.

OnePurze was born in Lagos and built on the frustration that ordinary Nigerians deserved better than what the banks were giving them. Faster answers, clearer records and a place where your money behaved the way you expected it to.

The name carries the whole idea. One, because everything should live in one place. Purze, because a purse is where you keep what matters most. Put them together, and you get a promise: one wallet, one platform, one financial home for everyday life.

From L-R:
Ologun Oluwadamilola Olakunle (COO), OnePurze; Ukpabi Faith Oyinyechi (Customer Care/Compliance officer); Bako David (CEO)

Who shows up for OnePurze?

Ask OnePurze who their customer is, and they will give you a long list. Students who need to pay school fees abroad. Freelancers who work for international clients and cannot afford to watch their money shrink in conversion fees. Small business owners who want to track what goes in and what goes out. Young Nigerians who live on their phones and have no patience for a system that asks them to visit a branch with three forms of ID.

But beneath all those categories, there is one common thread. The real OnePurze customer is someone who has been let down before. Someone who sent money that arrived three days late. Someone who tried to pay for a foreign subscription and watched their card decline for no clear reason. Someone whose salary came in, but the app showed zero because the network was down.

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Nigeria has produced millions of people like this. OnePurze wants all of them.

One of the most popular things OnePurze does is offer virtual dollar cards. For a Nigerian trying to pay for Netflix, buy something on Amazon, or subscribe to a tool for their freelance work, a dollar card is oxygen. But keeping those cards alive costs real money and real nerve.

Behind every successful payment a user makes with a OnePurze virtual card, there is a team managing foreign exchange rates, paying international processors, watching for fraud, keeping funds available, and staying on the right side of a regulatory environment that changes without warning. The CBN has opinions about how fintechs handle foreign currency. Those opinions carry weight.

OnePurze admits the pressure openly. The financial cost is significant, the operational demands are constant, and the emotional cost, in their own words, is perhaps the biggest of all. Every failed transaction carries weight when you are a company born specifically to prevent things from failing.

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They have kept the cards running. That, in this market, deserves to be said plainly.

The night the app stopped working

Every company that handles money has a story about the moment things went wrong. For OnePurze, that moment arrived in the form of a login problem that nobody could fully predict or explain.

Users started reporting that they could not access their accounts. The strange part was that the app worked fine on WiFi but refused to cooperate on mobile data. For a financial platform, when people cannot access their money, trust starts to leave the room quietly and quickly.

The team worked through it. Long hours, pressure from users, and the particular anxiety of not knowing exactly when the fix would come. There were moments of exhaustion and uncertainty. But the app came back. The users stayed. And OnePurze came out of that period with a harder understanding of what it means to be responsible for other people’s financial lives.

They say that experience changed how they think about reliability. That it stopped being a feature and became the whole point.

Purze Coin and a bigger bet

There is something else OnePurze is building quietly in the background. Every time a user pays a bill through the platform, they earn Purze Coin. Right now, those coins sit in the app as reward points. But OnePurze has a larger plan.

The vision is to tokenise Purze Coin. To turn those points into something that vendors, restaurants, delivery services, and subscription platforms will accept as actual payment. A user who pays their electricity bill today could earn coins that pay for lunch tomorrow.

This is either a very clever idea or a very complicated one, depending on how the regulatory conversation goes. Nigeria’s financial regulators have strong views about tokenised assets and what counts as money. OnePurze will need to have that conversation carefully and early.

But the instinct behind it is right. Traditional banks have never rewarded ordinary people for ordinary financial behaviour. You do not get a thank you for keeping your account active or paying your bills on time. OnePurze wants to change that relationship. It wants users to feel like the platform is working for them, not just processing their transactions.

What Nigeria taught the OnePurze team

There is a thing that happens to every business that tries to operate seriously in Nigeria. The country teaches it something that no business school can.

Infrastructure will fail. Regulations will shift. The exchange rate will move in a direction that breaks your projections. A network operator will do something that takes your app offline for an afternoon. A policy will change on a Friday, and the full implications will not be clear until Monday.

OnePurze has lived all of that. And they say it made them better. Not in the motivational poster sense. In the practical sense. They learned to build systems that expect problems. They learned to keep communication open with users even when the news was not good. They learned that in a market where trust is hard to build, the fastest way to destroy it is to go quiet when something goes wrong.

The company is two years old. It operates from Lekki. It serves students, freelancers, families, and small businesses. It has survived a technical crisis, the weight of Nigeria’s foreign exchange environment, and the daily pressure of being responsible for real people’s real money.

Besides the optimism, what will separate OnePurze is not the number of features on the app. It is whether the company can keep doing the hard, unglamorous work of being reliable in a country that makes reliability expensive.