Long before he was working on global payroll and fintech platforms, Adewale Adekomaiya was the person people called when things stopped working.
His career began in IT support at Great Nigeria Insurance and later at DO.II Designs. On a typical day, he installed software, fixed hardware, resolved system issues, and made sure everyday operations did not grind to a halt. Outside his day job, he ran a small technical services business, helping individuals and small offices solve real world technology problems.
Those early years shaped his outlook on technology in a very practical way. When systems fail, people feel it immediately. Work stops, trust is shaken, and the consequences are real.
That experience is what quietly pushed Adewale towards quality assurance. Rather than reacting to problems after they occurred, QA allowed him to focus on preventing failures before they reached users. It was a shift from fixing issues one by one to protecting systems at scale.
Today, that same mindset guides his work on global payroll and fintech platforms, where quality is not optional but foundational.
In fintech and payroll, Adewale explains, the difference between good QA and great QA is strategy. Good QA confirms that features work. Great QA anticipates where things might fail and addresses those risks early.
This means thinking beyond simple test cases. It involves covering complex realities like multi currency behaviour, payroll cut off times, asynchronous payment flows, retries, large value contracts, and edge cases that may only surface under pressure. Rather than testing isolated features, great QA validates entire end to end processes.
That proactive approach saves development time, reduces rework, and most importantly protects financial accuracy and user trust.
Having worked with both Nigerian and international companies, Adewale believes expectations around quality are largely universal. Users everywhere expect reliability. End to end processes must work, and QA is expected to deliver confidence in the product.
The real difference emerges with scale and regulation. International products often operate across multiple countries and regulatory environments. This increases the importance of compliance, data protection, and standards like GDPR. As products expand beyond local markets, QA plays a critical role in ensuring quality does not degrade under regulatory pressure.
When deciding what to automate and what to test manually, Adewale relies on risk, repeatability, and value. Anything business critical, repetitive, or prone to regression, such as payment flows, payroll calculations, and API validations, should be automated. Automation provides fast feedback and confidence as systems evolve.
Human judgment, however, remains essential. Exploratory testing helps uncover issues that tools alone cannot anticipate, especially around usability, evolving workflows, and complex scenarios that require context. For Adewale, strong QA teams strike the right balance, using automation for coverage and consistency, and human insight for discovery.
Explaining QA to non technical stakeholders often requires reframing the conversation. Adewale speaks less about tools and more about trust and risk. When products work reliably, customers stay, recommend them, and feel confident using them for sensitive tasks like payments and payroll. When they fail, trust erodes quickly and is difficult to rebuild.
Rigorous QA prevents costly errors, reduces outages, and protects brands from reputational damage. Fewer incidents also mean teams spend less time firefighting and more time building. In that sense, QA does not slow businesses down. It protects revenue and supports growth.
In fast paced Agile and DevOps environments, Adewale believes speed and quality can coexist if the right foundations are in place. Quality must be built into the process, not inspected at the end. Clear acceptance criteria, automated testing for critical flows, and quality checks embedded into CI and CD pipelines allow teams to move quickly without compromising reliability.
In fintech, risk based testing and strict quality gates remain essential, particularly in areas tied to compliance, data integrity, and financial accuracy. Catching issues early allows teams to ship faster while maintaining trust.
This approach proved valuable during work on the Paga V2 consumer app. Adewale focused on validating complete user journeys such as bank transfers, bill payments, and QR payments, ensuring transactions were accurate, timely, and consistent across scenarios. By covering edge cases before launch, QA helped reduce post release issues and build confidence in the upgraded platform, supporting adoption and engagement.
Security is another area where QA plays a central role. In regulated fintech systems, Adewale integrates security checks directly into application testing. This includes validating authentication, authorisation, role based access controls, secure API communication, and data encryption.
QA also ensures audit logging, data masking, and permission boundaries are consistently enforced across payment and payroll workflows. By embedding these checks into automated pipelines, security and compliance remain continuously validated as systems scale.
While technical skills like SQL and API testing are critical, Adewale argues that domain knowledge makes them effective. Understanding banking flows, payroll cycles, settlement processes, and payment lifecycles allows QA engineers to design meaningful tests and identify real risk.
Technical skills help execute tests efficiently, but domain knowledge helps ask the right questions. In fintech, the strongest QA professionals combine both.
Looking ahead, Adewale sees artificial intelligence influencing QA by improving efficiency rather than replacing people. AI can accelerate test case generation, analyse logs, detect flaky tests, and identify risk patterns across complex systems.
As a result, the role of QA engineers is evolving. Less time will be spent on repetitive execution, and more on quality leadership, strategy, and risk prioritisation. In regulated sectors like fintech, healthcare, and payroll, human judgment, accountability, and domain expertise will remain essential.
For Adewale Adekomaiya, quality has always been about trust, responsibility, and building systems people can rely on, both for everyday transactions or global payroll at scale.
