Albert Owusu Asare is a compassionate leader who is not afraid to structure unstructured processes. He formed his own company and turned Cadana into a profitable venture. He began his Wall Street career at Goldman Sachs, where he designed essential distributed systems that powered the Apple Card, a credit card offered to millions of Americans. He was also the company’s chief technology officer. Albert has pioneered the use of alternate data sources to facilitate consumer financing throughout his career. His role as the Chief technology officer was to Lead Esusu’s integrated product, technology, and data security strategy to successfully deliver all platform capabilities to clients and partners.
At the African Fintech Summit Albert spoke with TANTV reporter Karesha about his business Cadana and how it came about. Cadana is a platform that allows African workers to get paid on demand rather than at the end of the month, allowing them to access their earnings in real-time.
“Prior to starting Cadana, I was a CTO of another business here in the US and I used to hire software engineers all over the world and I would meet really incredible people from like Nigeria, good at what they do all over the world and it was always a challenge. They were ringing up their relatives for the US bank account somewhere using PayPal. It’s just all sorts of means just to get paid. And so it was pretty obvious to me that look, if these people have done the harder part of finding a job paying them shouldn’t be hard, right? And so there needs to be a way to fix that. And so fast forward, I decided to just build Cadana to help solve that problem,” said Albert Owusu Asare – CEO of Cadana
Running a multinational firm requires a lot of work and personnel. 70 companies in the United States and others on the African continent are allies of Cadana. The goal of Cadana is to pay people without them having to deal with the trouble of using their bank accounts. Having a successful business requires a lot of work and time, and Albert advises aspiring entrepreneurs to be passionate and focused on their goals because it is a difficult trip.
“I think it’s important to have a big supportive system but the biggest advice I would give is to not give up, be resilient and keep pushing,” said Albert.
Written By: Karesha Graham
