Mohammed Bashir Yunusa is a banking executive with over 15 years of experience driving growth, transformation, and value creation across the financial services industry. His expertise spans business strategy, digital banking, commerce, innovative finance, investment and deal structuring, corporate finance, and non-interest banking. 

As Divisional Head, Digital Banking & Commerce at The Alternative Bank, Yunusa provides strategic leadership for the Bank’s digital banking, commerce, product management, and ecosystem partnerships. He focuses on shaping growth strategies, developing customer-centric solutions, and creating sustainable value through technology, strategic partnerships, and forward-looking business models. 

Throughout his career, he has led transformative initiatives across business strategy, product development, digital banking, commerce, and innovative finance. His experience also encompasses investment and deal structuring, where he has advised on strategic transactions, financing models, and partnerships across multiple sectors of the economy. His approach combines commercial insight with disciplined financial structuring to deliver sustainable outcomes for institutions and businesses. His leadership has contributed to the development of pioneering financial products, digital platforms, and business models, including Nigeria’s first credit-based e-commerce platform. 

By combining technology, innovative finance, and commercial strategy, he has consistently unlocked new markets, enhanced customer experiences, and delivered sustainable growth. Yunusa holds a Global Executive MBA from IESE Business School, a Postgraduate Diploma in Strategy and Innovation from Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, a Master of Science in Strategic Planning from Heriot Watt University, and a Bachelor of Science (Hons.) in Business Administration (Finance) from Ahmadu Bello University, where he also graduated with distinction in Accounting. 

He believes finance is at its most powerful when it expands opportunity, enables enterprise, and creates shared prosperity. His work is guided by a commitment to building institutions that combine commercial excellence with innovation to deliver lasting economic and societal impact.

• Explain your job to a five-year-old.

I help people save, spend, borrow, and grow their money in smarter ways. 

My team builds the tools that make banking simple, fast, and useful, so people can focus on living their lives while money quietly works for them.

• Non-interest banking removes the tool most digital lenders build credit products around: interest. How do you build a credit-based commerce platform without it? 

You stop thinking about lending and start thinking about trade. 

In non-interest banking, every transaction must be backed by a genuine commercial activity that forces you to build around assets, partnerships, and real economic value, not risk-priced through interest. 

Our job isn’t to replicate conventional banking. It’s to build better commercial models where customers gain access to goods and services, merchants increase sales, and the bank earns from facilitating genuine trade. Done well, everyone wins. 

• You helped build Nigeria’s first credit-based e-commerce platform. What almost killed it before it worked? 

The technology wasn’t the difficult part. Behaviour was. 

We assumed customers wanted credit. What they actually wanted was confidence: that delivery would happen, that repayment would be simple, and that the product would genuinely improve their lives. 

The lesson: innovation succeeds when it solves a trust problem before it solves a technology problem. 

• Inside a bank, where do the digital banking team and the commerce team actually disagree? 

Digital teams optimise experiences. Commerce teams optimise economics. 

Digital wants fewer clicks; commerce wants higher lifetime value. Digital celebrates user growth; commerce asks whether those users are profitable.

The best organisations make customer experience and commercial sustainability improve together, not one at the other’s expense. 

• In bank-fintech-merchant partnerships, who holds the leverage, and has that shifted in the last few years? 

Leverage belongs to whoever owns the customer relationship. 

A few years ago, fintechs had the advantage because they moved faster. Today, banks have become significantly more digital, merchants more sophisticated, and customers expect integrated experiences. 

The future belongs to partnerships where everyone contributes something unique—not to whoever tries to own everything. 

• What’s a deal or partnership you walked away from that looked good on paper, both in your career and in your role overseeing a division at The Alternative Bank?

I came across a transaction recently that looked incredibly attractive on paper. It promised strong returns and could have worked well for the first few deals. 

The more I thought about it, though, the more I realised it wasn’t the kind of business I want to build. It relied too heavily on today’s market conditions, today’s financing model, and today’s technology. As those evolve, so does its value proposition. 

So I walked away. 

I’ve become less interested in opportunities that make money today and more interested in building businesses that will still matter decades from now. Businesses that adapt, compound,  and create value long after we’re gone. 

Short-term wins are exciting. Enduring institutions are far more rewarding. 

• Your background is in deal structuring and corporate finance. What’s the real tension between building at product speed and structuring it at the speed finance—and money—is supposed to move? 

Innovation rewards speed; finance rewards discipline, and the mistake is believing you have to choose one. 

Good organisations build governance into the product development process, so risk management becomes an accelerator rather than a brake. 

Moving fast without discipline creates expensive mistakes. Moving perfectly but too slowly creates missed opportunities. 

• What’s the biggest risk in Nigerian digital banking right now that isn’t being talked about enough? 

Everyone is competing for users. Very few are building sustainable economics. 

Customer acquisition has become relatively easy. Building profitable, engaged, long-term relationships is much harder. 

The institutions that survive will be the ones that understand lifetime value, not just download numbers. 

• What’s a decision you made that was commercially right but took years to be proven right? 

Investing heavily in ecosystems instead of individual products. 

Products can be copied; distribution, partnerships, and integrated ecosystems are far harder to replicate. That thinking wasn’t always popular—ecosystems take longer to mature—but once they do, they become powerful competitive advantages.

• What’s a belief about banking in Nigeria that most people inside the industry get wrong? 

That banks are primarily financial institutions. 

I believe banks are increasingly becoming technology-enabled commerce platforms.  Money is simply the medium. The real opportunity is enabling people and businesses to transact, invest, save, and grow more efficiently. 

The institutions that understand this transition will define the next decade. 

• What’s the strongest contrarian prediction you have about the future of digital banking in Nigeria?

The biggest banks of the next decade may not win because they have the most branches or even the most customers. They’ll win because they own the most valuable ecosystems. 

It isn’t about becoming the biggest bank. It’s about becoming the platform where customers build their financial lives.

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