Yvonne Johnson left investment banking in New York to join the transformation team at First Bank of Nigeria. She spent eight years there, rising to Head of Strategy and Corporate Development - restructuring the operating model and building the bank's first digital finance strategy. When she left in 2018, she didn't start a lender. She co-founded Indicina, the API-driven credit infrastructure company that banks, digital lenders, and fintechs across Nigeria and Kenya now use to make faster, smarter credit decisions. This episode is a masterclass in building at the infrastructure layer - the rails, not the balance sheet.

Key Topics Covered:

• Why she left Merrill Lynch to join First Bank - the deliberate career bet on institutional transformation
• What eight years inside Nigeria's largest retail bank taught her about stakeholder management and systemic change
• The founding decision: why Indicina was never going to be a lender
• The cost of capital argument: why banks will always win if you try to compete on balance sheet
• How to sell to institutional clients with long procurement cycles and multiple sign-offs
• The real friction in Africa's credit gap - it is not just a data problem, it is an accessibility problem
• The opportunity cost problem: why banks choose government bonds over consumer loans
• What the next ten years looks like for African credit infrastructure
• What she would do differently - customer sequencing and the balance sheet question revisited