Tomi Popoola is one of the most exciting voices in the world of FinTech speakers, recognised for her deep expertise at the intersection of financial innovation, AI, and inclusive technology. With a career spanning data science, software engineering, and product strategy, Tomi has worked with global brands and emerging ventures to redefine how technology powers access, efficiency, and equity in finance.
Celebrated among leading artificial intelligence speakers and technology speakers, Tomi champions the role of scalable innovation in transforming underserved communities and accelerating digital transformation in financial services.
As a passionate advocate for representation in tech, she’s also a prominent figure among diversity and inclusion speakers and women in business speakers, inspiring a new generation of leaders to reimagine the future of finance from the ground up.
In this exclusive interview with Champions Speakers Agency, Tomi shares her insights on the evolving role of AI in financial services, the impact of cloud computing on innovation, and why accessibility, ethics, and inclusion must remain at the heart of every technological breakthrough.
Q: From fraud detection to credit scoring, AI is reshaping financial services. In your view, what are the most transformative ways artificial intelligence has influenced the sector so far?
Tomi Popoola: “I’ll say it’s shaped it for the past few decades, and it’s made huge progress. So, when you think about artificial intelligence and machine learning at the same time, you would see the huge leaps that the financial sector has made and how it’s grown.
“Examples could be fraud detection—small businesses are able to detect fraud a lot earlier, helping not only the end users but also their businesses as well.
“Another thing is access. Access is a huge thing because, previously, without AI and ML, you wouldn’t find that people in, say, underserved countries had more access to certain financial services. It’s provided access—when you think about credit scoring, we typically used traditional data or traditional methods, but now we have alternative data sets being brought in and new perspectives to look at.
“You can also look at tailored financial decisions—both financial decisions as well as financial services and solutions for people. Now that we have more access to data, and we’re using machine learning, artificial intelligence can easily tailor certain solutions to people.
“Because of this, you’re increasing your customer base, you’re increasing the innovation in the financial sector, and you’re making sure the limits and possibilities are endless.
“So, I’ll say it has shaped it from where it started. It’s currently shaping it, but there’s still a huge growth aspect out there that is yet to be tapped into. Being able to leverage AI in the perfect way for certain scenarios will definitely help—just as it already has been helping.”
Q: Businesses today are inundated with AI options—but what guiding principles should leaders follow to apply AI meaningfully and maximise both customer impact and operational return?
Tomi Popoola: “You need to think about your business. You need to think about the benefit it can bring to your business and your end users. If you don’t think about it that way, it could be very counterintuitive otherwise.
“First of all—what does your business lack? And then—how can you make your business more efficient? But then also, how can you turn that into return customers, customer satisfaction, and improved ROI?
“An example of this could be—say you’re a business that deals with customers, a B2C business. You can think, “Okay, my customers could possibly have questions or need to speak to certain agents or customer service.”
“Then you could build a pre-programmed chatbot. A pre-programmed chatbot could have different answers to your FAQs, recently asked questions, or disputes that you could help solve.
“That’s a two-way thing. From an internal perspective, that could reduce your operational or administrative overhead—the number of people being sent to human agents. From your customer’s perspective, it could increase satisfaction, making that process more efficient and encouraging them to return, use your service, or buy your product—depending on what that looks like. It could cut their waiting time and solve those disputes.
“That’s just one example. Another could be personalised experiences, better decision-making—when it comes to lending, things like that. I think one thing, when it comes to how businesses can harness the technical benefits, is actually looking at data being power when used correctly.”
Q: Cloud computing is often described as the backbone of modern tech. How has it fuelled innovation in the technology sector, particularly for emerging players in FinTech and AI?
Tomi Popoola: “This is one question that I love. Because when you actually think about innovation and creativity, you think about the cloud a lot more than people would say.
“Prior to the cloud, we had on-premise data centres. What this meant was that it was very hard for small businesses to survive, because you needed servers, you needed databases—you had to go and buy these things, which could be very expensive—and you could easily start to incur technical debt.
“Now, with the cloud, what that does is virtualise all of this. You’re basically paying for the service as you’re using it. This allows for innovation a lot quicker.
“One, you have small businesses that can easily pay for this via a pay-as-you-go subscription for their technological users. But then also, you have quick learning and quick innovation without technical debt.
“Take generative AI as an example. The cloud has provided the access to generative AI—you can scale generative AI, build LLMs, build models, scale them, deploy them—and this allows for quick growth, but also for market competition.
“Previously, being able to do things like this would cost so much money that small businesses couldn’t afford it. And even large businesses couldn’t afford to put all their eggs in one basket.
“But the cloud has created this concept of two-way door decisions—where you can innovate, and if that didn’t work out for you, you can come back from that.
“You can easily scale, serve large numbers of customers, and learn new things at the same time. So, when you think about continuous integration, CI/CD, robotics, containerisation—even things as basic as being able to create your own website—so many of these things have been made possible in the modern day because of the cloud.”
