By Ivy Samuel
Morakinyo (Akin) Isaac-Olaniyi is Co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Eazipay. Before Eazipay, he held HR roles at Coca-Cola Hellenic, Subsea 7 and British American Tobacco, a path that gave him a view of employment, payroll and money from the inside of large organisations before he set out to build software for them.
That history shapes how he talks about product. He does not speak in slogans. He speaks about assumptions, discipline and trust, words that recur through a conversation about how Eazipay grew from a single market into a business operating across Nigeria and the UK.
Eazipay’s first enterprise customer employed thousands of staff. The UK expansion that followed brought a different set of demands entirely. Isaac-Olaniyi says the experience taught him that a product can address the same underlying problem in two places without functioning the same way in either.
“A product can solve the same fundamental problem in two markets without necessarily being used in the same way,” he says. Building for one market, he explains, breeds familiarity with local rhythms, payroll cycles, the relationship between HR and Finance, the point at which users expect a system to take over. Over time, those local habits can start to feel like universal truths, when they are not.
Scale added its own pressure. Serving an enterprise customer with thousands of employees exposed weaknesses that smaller deployments never would. “Permissions become more important, approval structures become more complex, reporting expectations increase,” he says, “and a small inefficiency in a workflow becomes much more significant when thousands of employees are involved.”
The UK introduced a further test: a different regulatory environment and different expectations from customers. It forced the team to separate what belonged to the product itself from what had simply grown up around the Nigerian market where the company began. His conclusion is a working principle rather than a formula: “You should not assume that everything needs to be rebuilt… At the same time, you cannot simply take what worked in one country, change the currency and assume you now have an international product.”
Eazipay serves small businesses alongside large enterprise HR and Finance teams, a pairing that might sound like a contradiction. Isaac-Olaniyi rejects the framing. “I don’t actually see simplicity and enterprise capability as opposites,” he says. “The person using it still wants to complete their work without unnecessary complexity.”
His answer lies in layering rather than duplication. Basic payroll, records and approvals cover a small business’s needs. Larger organisations require permissions, audit trails, integrations and controls, but those extra layers, he argues, need not surface for every user. “The core experience should remain understandable, while additional capability becomes available as the organisation’s needs become more sophisticated.”
He is direct about a habit he sees elsewhere in enterprise software: treating complexity as proof of seriousness. He disagrees, and offers a reason rooted in economics rather than taste — at scale, an unnecessary step multiplies across an entire organisation, so complexity becomes costly rather than impressive.
Eazipay’s portfolio spans HRIS, banking, credit and payroll infrastructure. Asked how he draws the line between expansion and clutter, Isaac-Olaniyi starts from the customer rather than the balance sheet. “The first question I ask is whether the products are solving connected problems for the same customer,” he says.
Money, he notes, sits close to employment by nature, a business tracks who works for it, calculates pay, moves that money, and often wants further financial services attached to that same activity. But proximity alone does not settle the matter for him. He weighs whether a new capability strengthens what already exists, whether customers already trust the company in that area, and whether the operational capacity is genuinely there. A test of user experience follows: if customers must learn four separate systems or repeat the same information across them, the portfolio has grown without making anyone’s work easier.
His clearest position concerns transformation projects that mistake digitisation for progress. “You can take a twelve-step manual process, put all twelve steps into software and call it digital transformation,” he says. “Technically, you have digitised the process, but you have not necessarily made it better.” Before reaching for a tool, he asks which steps in a process manage genuine risk, which persist out of habit, and where time is spent without producing a better outcome. Success, in his framing, is measured afterwards, in time saved, errors reduced and cost genuinely removed rather than shifted elsewhere.
The final theme is trust. As AI, employee data and financial services converge inside workplace software, Isaac-Olaniyi argues that product leaders carry obligations that revenue and adoption figures cannot capture. “Those are areas where a product can be commercially successful and still cause harm if the company has not thought carefully about how the technology should be used,” he says.
He raises a pointed question about engagement metrics in financial products: “If a feature increases usage while consistently leaving employees in a worse financial position, then high engagement is not necessarily a good outcome.” His closing thought sets out the stakes plainly: “Whether customers and employees can trust the decisions we make with the technology and information available to us. Once that trust is lost, it is much harder to rebuild than any feature.”
For Isaac-Olaniyi, that trust, not the size of the portfolio or the speed of growth, is the real measure of the work.