Asher's Blog

Trust sounds like one of those qualities that everybody praises but nobody measures.

Companies put it in their values; leaders speak about it during retreats. Brands use words such as secure, dependable and transparent in their advertising. Yet when the monthly report is prepared, trust is often absent. The company measures website visits, leads, conversion, revenue and retention, while treating trust as something vague and emotional.

I think that is a mistake. Trust has a conversion rate.

It converts attention into a purchase. It converts a first transaction into a repeated one. It converts a customer into a referral. It converts an investor’s interest into a signed cheque. It converts a bank’s assessment into a credit facility. It converts a talented candidate into an employee and an employee into someone willing to remain during a difficult season.

The opposite is also true. A trust deficit increases the cost of every transaction. Customers need more persuasion. Investors ask for more protection. Banks require more collateral. Employees begin to prepare alternatives. Suppliers shorten payment terms. People may still do business with you, but they demand compensation for the possibility that your word will fail.

Trust is not a soft idea sitting beside the business. It is part of the economics of the business.

Loyalty is a two-way street

One of the statements I return to is this: loyalty is a two-way street; if you demand it, you must also earn it.

Businesses often ask customers to remain loyal, employees to make sacrifices and investors to remain patient. But loyalty cannot be demanded permanently from people whose trust the company repeatedly violates.

If you want employees to believe in the company, you must honour your obligations to them. If you want customers to deposit money, share sensitive data or depend on your service, you must protect what they place in your hands. If you want investors to continue supporting you, you must communicate honestly and steward their capital responsibly. If you want a bank to extend credit when you need it, you must establish a history of respecting previous commitments.

Trust is reciprocal. It grows when both parties discover that the other person’s word can survive inconvenience.

Almost anybody can appear trustworthy when keeping the promise is easy. Character becomes visible when keeping it requires sacrifice, early communication, a change of plan or the admission of an uncomfortable fact. This is where loyalty is earned.

Trust changes customer behaviour

In Nigeria, trust is not an abstract concern for customers using financial products. It directly affects adoption and continued usage.

Innovations for Poverty Action surveyed users of digital financial services across 24 Nigerian states in 2024. The survey was not nationally representative, so its figures should not be projected carelessly onto the entire country, but its findings are still instructive. Respondents identified access, trust, cost and service quality as important factors in choosing providers. Trust and recommendations from friends and family influenced selection, while poor service, fraud and consumer-protection failures contributed to discontinuation.

The same research found that 84 per cent of respondents had experienced at least one challenge with digital financial services. Fifty-eight per cent had at some point been targeted by a fraud attempt through a phone call or text message, and 6 per cent had lost money through fraud or a transaction that went wrong during the previous year.

These experiences affect conversion. A customer who has lost money does not evaluate the next financial product in the same way as someone encountering digital finance for the first time. The new provider is not starting from zero. It is starting below zero, carrying suspicion created by the failures of other companies.

This is why trust can become a competitive advantage. When two companies offer similar returns, fees or functionality, the customer may choose the one believed to be more reliable. In financial services, a slightly higher return may not overcome the fear that the principal could disappear. A beautiful interface may attract attention, but customers will not place substantial money on it merely because it is attractive.

They must believe the company will still be there when they want their money back.

Trust converts into deposits; it converts into larger balances. It converts into longer holding periods and recommendations to family members. When trust falls, the conversion works in reverse: withdrawals increase, referrals stop, support traffic rises and acquisition becomes more expensive.

Reliability is marketing

Nigeria’s digital-payment market demonstrates something else: reliability eventually becomes part of the brand.

KPMG’s 2025 banking research, reported in Nigerian media, found that weekly mobile-banking usage increased from 58 per cent in 2024 to 69 per cent in 2025, alongside improved customer satisfaction with availability and uptime. The same research identified fraud protection, data privacy and security controls such as PINs, one-time passwords and biometrics as leading factors customers use to judge trust.

This means reliability is not merely an engineering metric hidden on an internal dashboard. It affects whether customers return.

Every successful transaction is a small piece of evidence. Every correctly processed payroll, properly completed remittance and promptly resolved complaint tells the customer that the company can be trusted with something slightly more important next time.

Marketing can make a promise once. Operations either confirms or contradicts it every day.

This is why companies should stop treating trust as the responsibility of only the communications team. Engineering creates trust through uptime and security. Finance creates trust through liquidity and accurate reconciliation. Customer service creates trust through responsiveness. Leadership creates trust through honesty. Governance creates trust by ensuring that one person cannot quietly misuse the resources of everyone else. Trust is the combined output of the company.

African founders inherit an ecosystem’s reputation

One of the reasons I am determined for us to succeed at Eazipay is that our success will not belong entirely to us.

When a company built by African founders becomes enduring, intelligent and globally respected, it expands what other people believe can come out of the continent. Investors become more willing to examine the next company. Talented people become more willing to join. Enterprise customers become more comfortable purchasing from an African technology provider. Other founders inherit a little more credibility than they had before.

Successful companies do not merely create shareholder value; they create evidence. This is important because ecosystems have reputations. Silicon Valley benefits from decades of companies that have demonstrated what can be built there. A new founder in that ecosystem still has to earn trust personally, but the location itself supplies a certain amount of credibility. People already believe that an extraordinary technology company can emerge from San Francisco.

African founders are still expanding that field of belief. Every major success makes the next ambitious story sound less improbable. Every well-governed company makes it easier to argue that capital can be deployed responsibly. Every founder who communicates honestly during difficulty helps separate genuine entrepreneurship from opportunism.

This does not mean one African founder should be personally blamed for the reputation of an entire continent, nor should African companies be held to an impossible standard that companies elsewhere escape. But we should understand the historical opportunity; we are not building only products. We are building precedents.

We must be bold enough to think of ourselves as pioneers. A pioneer does more than enter a new market. A pioneer makes a path believable to the people coming afterwards.

Credit is institutional memory

I remember listening to Alhaji Aliko Dangote speak at Lagos Business School many years ago. One of the lessons I took from him was the seriousness with which he treated his relationships with banks. The principle was simple: if financial institutions are going to support you when the opportunity becomes larger than your available cash, they must have evidence that your commitments mean something.

That principle can be seen in the financing history of the Dangote refinery.

In 2013, a consortium of 12 Nigerian and international banks supported a $3.3 billion term-loan facility for the refinery project. The project later required additional and restructured financing as its cost and timeline expanded. In 2025, Afreximbank announced a further $1.35 billion facility for Dangote Industries as part of a larger financing arrangement connected to the refinery.

A bank does not provide financing of that scale because it likes the borrower’s ambition. It evaluates assets, cash flows, risks, security, management and repayment capacity. But historical credibility also matters. The borrower’s record affects whether the next proposal is even considered seriously.

Credit is trust expressed through money. The interest rate, collateral requirement, covenants, repayment period and amount available are all influenced by how risk is assessed. A trustworthy business does not automatically receive cheap capital, but a business that repeatedly breaks commitments will eventually discover that capital has become more expensive or unavailable.

This is true even outside banking. Suppliers decide whether to offer goods on credit. Landlords decide whether to accept flexible terms. Partners decide whether to commit resources before being paid. Trust changes the terms on which the world is willing to transact with you.

Salary is a trust test

One of the most direct promises a company makes is the promise to pay its employees.

An employee does not merely exchange time for money. The employee arranges an entire life around the expectation that salary will arrive on a particular schedule. Rent, transportation, food, school fees, family support and debt repayments may all depend on it.

When a company repeatedly delays salaries without honest communication, it is not only experiencing a cash-flow problem. It is spending trust.

Founders often reach this point because they are trying to protect jobs. They believe revenue will arrive soon, fundraising is nearly complete or the next contract will solve the shortfall. The intention may be good, but employees cannot finance the company indefinitely through unpaid compensation.

The responsible decision begins before the crisis. Watch cash flow. Maintain a realistic runway forecast. Distinguish signed revenue from cash in the bank. Avoid hiring ahead of the company’s capacity merely to appear larger. Build reserves where possible, and confront a structural shortfall early.

If the company can no longer support its payroll, a lawful and humane restructuring may be less damaging than allowing unpaid salaries to accumulate. That does not make layoffs easy or automatically correct. It means leadership must compare difficult alternatives honestly. Reducing the team, narrowing the strategy or cutting founder compensation may preserve the company’s ability to honour the commitments it retains.

Do not bite off more than you can chew. Growth that depends on regularly betraying employees is not healthy growth.

The same principle applies to governments. When public employees are owed for months, the damage extends beyond household hardship. Citizens learn that an official commitment may not be dependable. Institutional trust declines, and future promises carry less weight.

Paying people on time is not merely an administrative achievement. It is one of the clearest demonstrations that the institution respects the people who sustain it.

Customer money is not company money

The most dangerous trust failure in financial services occurs when a company forgets the difference between money it owns and money entrusted to it.

Customer funds can appear temptingly available, especially when a business is under pressure. A founder may believe the money can be borrowed temporarily, invested somewhere with a higher return or used to solve a short-term liquidity problem. But once money held for customers is treated as operating capital without lawful authority and appropriate safeguards, the company has crossed a serious line.

Customer money should be protected through the structures appropriate to the product and jurisdiction: segregation, custody arrangements, reconciliations, access controls, approved investment mandates, liquidity management, independent oversight and clear records of beneficial ownership.

The details differ across banking, payments, savings, investments and digital assets, but the principle is constant. The fact that money passes through your system does not make it yours.

Around the world, financial-company collapses have repeatedly shown how quickly trust disappears when customers discover that their assets were diverted, inadequately protected or represented dishonestly. Arrests and prosecutions may follow, but legal action cannot always restore the years of savings or the confidence that customers have lost.

For African fintech companies, this responsibility is even more consequential because every failure can reinforce suspicion towards the broader sector. Again, that does not excuse unfair generalizations, but founders should understand the real market effect. A customer harmed by one provider becomes harder for every responsible provider to convert.

Protecting customer funds therefore builds value beyond your own company. It protects confidence in the category.

Investor trust does not mean promising the impossible

There is also the trust between a founder and an investor. When someone provides capital, the founder has a duty to steward it seriously. The money should be used for the purpose represented, material changes should be communicated, proper records should be maintained, conflicts should be disclosed and bad news should not be hidden until the options have disappeared.

I believe founders should pursue the multiplication of capital with conviction. Investors did not provide money so that it could be treated casually. A founder should search for creative and strategic ways to create value and should not use market difficulty as an excuse for indiscipline.

But trust does not require pretending that every investment can be multiplied. Venture investing involves genuine risk, and some companies will fail despite disciplined effort. The founder’s obligation is not to guarantee an outcome that cannot honestly be guaranteed. The obligation is to apply judgment, effort, integrity and transparency.

If one venture fails and the founder later starts another, there may be circumstances in which inviting earlier investors to participate—perhaps with early access or favourable terms—helps preserve the relationship. But this is not a universal rule. The new business may involve different founders, intellectual property, risks and capital needs. Offering equity informally can create legal and governance problems.

The deeper principle is continuity of character. Do not disappear from the people who backed you. Explain what happened. Honour any surviving obligations. Share what you learned. Give them a fair opportunity to evaluate the next chapter where appropriate and properly documented. Investors can forgive a failed business more easily than deception.

Trust compounds—and so does distrust

Trust behaves like capital; a promise kept once creates a small balance. Promises kept repeatedly allow the balance to compound. Eventually, people act with less friction because they have a history on which to rely. A customer deposits more; a bank processes the request faster. An investor takes the meeting; a talented person accepts the offer. A partner begins work before every detail has been negotiated.

Francis Fukuyama, in Trust, argues that the level of trust within a society influences its ability to create large and effective organizations. Stephen M. R. Covey makes a related business argument in The Speed of Trust: when trust rises, speed tends to increase and cost tends to fall.

You can observe this inside a company. A low-trust organization documents every minor interaction defensively, copies several people into every email and requires approvals for decisions employees should be capable of making. Some controls are necessary, but excessive friction often reflects the expectation that someone will abuse freedom.

High trust allows movement, but it should not mean the absence of controls. Good governance makes trust scalable. It replaces blind faith in personalities with systems that allow honest people to work efficiently and make dishonesty easier to detect.

Distrust compounds too. One delayed payment leads a supplier to demand cash in advance. That worsens the company’s working capital. Poor working capital creates another delay. Employees hear rumours and begin leaving; customers become nervous. The company spends more time managing suspicion than creating value. Trust can become a growth loop. Distrust can become a decline loop.

Measure the conversion

If trust has a conversion rate, companies should look for evidence of it.

No single metric can measure trust completely, but several behaviours reveal it:

• What percentage of new customers come through referrals?
• Do customers increase the amount of money or work entrusted to the company over time?
• How many customers renew without requiring discounts?
• How quickly do customers recover confidence after an incident?
• How frequently do employees refer talented friends to join the company?
• Do suppliers extend better terms as the relationship matures?
• Can the company borrow on better terms than it could previously?
• Do existing investors participate again?
• How often do enterprise customers expand from one product or business unit to another?
• What percentage of complaints arise from broken promises rather than product limitations?

These behaviours turn trust from a slogan into something observable. The company should also measure its trust liabilities: unresolved customer balances, delayed salaries, missed commitments, uncommunicated product changes, security incidents, reconciliation differences and obligations that are repeatedly rolled forward.

A business may report growing revenue while accumulating trust debt. Eventually, that debt becomes due.

Tell the truth before you are forced to

One of the fastest ways to preserve trust during difficulty is to communicate early.

People can sometimes accommodate a changed date, revised target or unexpected problem. What they resent is discovering that the other party knew the truth and deliberately kept quiet.

Do not wait for the employee to ask where the salary is. Do not wait for the customer to discover the missing transaction. Do not wait for the investor to notice that performance is far behind the forecast. Say what happened, what it affects, what you are doing and when the next update will come.

This does not mean sharing every unfinished thought or creating panic. It means refusing to use silence as a strategy for avoiding accountability.

Trust is strengthened by accurate expectations, not constant optimism. Sometimes the most trustworthy thing a founder can say is, “I do not know yet, but this is what we know, this is what we are checking, and I will return with an answer by this time.”

Trust is the permission to become bigger

Every growing company eventually asks people to trust it with more. More customers. More money. More employee livelihoods. More sensitive information. More credit. More authority. More influence.

Growth is therefore not merely an increase in transactions. It is an expansion of entrusted responsibility.

If the character, controls and financial discipline of the company do not grow with that responsibility, scale will reveal the weakness rather than cure it. A small breach of trust becomes a large one because more people are exposed.

This is why I believe Eazipay’s success matters beyond our cap table. If we build an enduring company, honour our obligations and produce products that businesses can depend on, we help make the next ambitious African company more believable. We add our evidence to a growing body of evidence that something intelligent, ethical and globally important can be built from Africa.

That opportunity should make us daring, but it should also make us responsible.

Trust cannot be demanded. It must be earned in salaries paid, customer money protected, difficult truths communicated, investor capital respected and promises kept when breaking them would be more convenient.

Loyalty is a two-way street. If you want customers, employees, banks, investors and partners to remain loyal to you, build a company that remains loyal to its commitments.

Because trust is not merely what people say about your business. Trust is what makes them decide to do business with you again.

That is its conversion rate. —

References and further reading

• Innovations for Poverty Action, Consumer Protection in Digital Financial Services: Nigeria Consumer Survey 2024.
• Premium Times, “Trust, speed and inclusion will shape payments’ future”, reporting findings from KPMG’s 2025 Nigerian banking survey.
• Lagos Business School, Dangote Inspiring Entrepreneurs.
• Standard Chartered, September 2013 announcement of Dangote Industries’ $3.3 billion term-loan facility, supported by 12 local and international banks.
• Afreximbank, August 2025 announcement of a $1.35 billion financing facility for Dangote Industries, as part of a larger syndicated refinancing.
• Francis Fukuyama, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity.
• Stephen M. R. Covey, The Speed of Trust.