Esther Fawole
Akeem Adebisi is a software manager and fintech entrepreneur who brings innovative ideas to life, one of the ideas is called Ajopro .
Ajopro was created to provide an opportunity for Black people or immigrant families to borrow money without interest and avoid costly payday loans.
This initiative was founded by Darrell penner who is the Chief Executive Officer of AjoPro.
He first came to Winnipeg, Canada, with his family in 2015. He got his first job at Shell Communications. Among his duties taking calls was included and he would usually spend like eight hours picking phone calls.
His duty was pretty intense and sometimes people just call him names not minding where he was coming from because of his accent. Despite the pressure and sometimes outright racism he faced in his first job, he saw it as a learning curve.
He had an encounter with people who could not raise money to pay off student loans or save in order to purchase a home and people getting payday loans without, knowing how the system works. Adebisi felt bad because he was once a ‘victim’ of the payday loan system, he took a payday loan and saw himself crumble under mounting interest payments but he dealt with it by finding money elsewhere to pay off the loan he took.
Most people faced challenges when they first come to Canada and the banking system is not helping that. The Black community in Manitoba are doing three or four jobs perday just to make ends meet.
He then decided to launch the fintech app after noticing how people in Winnipeg, Canada, struggled in the formal banking system.
The AjoPro app saw $2 million in transactions as at 2021.
People were so happy and pleased with the help which Adebisi offered them and he also feel this tremendous joy for making people happy and for changing lives.
Seeing people use his platform to pay their school fees, buy a house or establish themselves in Canada brings Adesibi nothing but an absolute joy.
