400% Subscription Growth During COVID-19: The Technical and Strategic Decisions Behind Nigeria’s First Digital Capital Markets Solution

400% Subscription Growth During COVID-19: The Technical and Strategic Decisions Behind Nigeria’s First Digital Capital Markets Solution

March 2020. Nigeria enters lockdown. MTN’s commercial paper needs subscribers. Physical roadshows are impossible. Traditional capital markets infrastructure isn’t built for digital-first participation.

Most organizations would have delayed. Chapel Hill Denham didn’t. And the program manager leading the charge, Kehinde Ejukorlem, had weeks to deliver what had never been done before in Nigeria: a fully functional digital subscription platform during a global pandemic.

The result? Over 400% subscription growth. A blueprint that would later become Nigeria’s first digital IPO app. And a fundamental shift in how retail investors access capital markets in Africa’s largest economy.

This is the story of how it happened.

The Problem: Capital Markets Built for a World That No Longer Existed

Before COVID-19, Nigeria’s capital markets operated on a model that required physical presence. Want to subscribe to a commercial paper offering? You’d attend roadshows, fill out paper forms, visit broker offices, and submit physical documentation. The system worked, until it didn’t.

When Nigeria went into lockdown in March 2020, the MTN Nigeria commercial paper offering faced a crisis. The traditional playbook was suddenly useless. No roadshows. No branch visits. No face-to-face interactions with brokers. And the clock was ticking.

Chapel Hill Denham had a choice: postpone and wait for normalcy to return, or build something entirely new. They chose disruption.

Kenny Ejukorlem, then Program Manager for Retail, was tasked with leading the digital transformation project. She had deep experience in customer engagement and digital product development from her years at Diamond Bank, but this was different. This wasn’t optimizing an existing product. This was building infrastructure for a market that had never operated digitally, under immense time pressure, with regulatory scrutiny, and with the entire financial services industry watching.

The Strategic Insight: Digital Doesn’t Mean Complicated

The first critical decision was philosophical, not technical: the solution needed to be simple enough for a first-time retail investor to use without assistance.

Given the time constraints and the urgent need to get something functional into the market, the team made a pragmatic decision: build a web-based digital subscription form first. Not a full mobile app. Not a complex platform with bells and whistles. A streamlined web form that could handle the core subscription workflow while meeting all regulatory requirements.

This meant:

• No jargon that required a finance degree to understand
• Minimal steps from registration to subscription
• Clear visual hierarchy that guided users through the process
• Mobile-responsive design because Nigerian users would access it from their phones, even if it wasn’t a native app yet

The team studied user behavior data from Diamond Bank’s successful mobile banking adoption campaigns, particularly the “Diamond Yello” product, which Kenny had previously worked on. The lesson was clear: remove friction, make the value proposition immediately obvious, and users will adopt.

The Technical Architecture: Building for Scale and Trust

Building a digital subscription platform isn’t just about form design. It’s about architecting a system that can handle sensitive financial transactions, integrate with legacy capital markets infrastructure, comply with regulatory requirements, and scale to handle hundreds of thousands of potential users, all while maintaining security and data integrity.

Kenny led the cross-functional team through three critical technical workstreams:

1. Integration with Existing Capital Markets Infrastructure

The platform couldn’t exist in isolation. It needed to connect with the Nigerian Stock Exchange systems, Central Securities Clearing System (CSCS) for investor identification, payment gateways for fund transfers, and Chapel Hill Denham’s internal broker systems.

Each integration point represented a potential failure mode. Legacy systems weren’t architected for API-first. The solution needed to build middleware that could converse between contemporary web architecture and decades-old financial infrastructure, without providing latency that would irritate users or introduce security risk. 

2. KYC and Compliance in a Digital-First World

One of the hardest problems wasn’t technical; it was regulatory. How do you conduct Know Your Customer (KYC) verification when customers can’t come to your office?

The team implemented digital identification verification through Bank Verification Numbers (BVN), auto-upload and verify documents, credit bureau integration for background checks, and audit trails that passed regulatory scrutiny.

This wasn’t about getting regulatory approval; it was about trust. Nigerian customers had to feel confident that their money and data were secure, especially with so much fuss about online scams.

3. Payment Infrastructure That Actually Worked

Payment processing in Nigeria in 2020 was famously dodgy. Failed transactions. Delayed confirmations. Money debited from accounts but not reflected in subscriptions.

Kenny’s team implemented multiple payment gateway integrations for redundancy, real-time transaction confirmation workflows, automated reconciliation to catch discrepancies immediately, and clear user communication at every step of the payment process.

The philosophy was simple: never leave a user wondering if their money went through.

The Go-To-Market Strategy: Creating Demand As They Built the Product

The vast majority of product teams get it wrong and build in secret, then launch with pomp. Kenny took a different approach: build demand in parallel with product development.

Even while the platform was still in development, the team ran digital campaigns explaining what commercial paper is and how digital participation would work, designed business development frameworks including scripts and training materials for the 200 direct sales staff hired to support the launch, and tested relentlessly, achieving a 98% functionality test result before deployment.

The Launch: Turning Crisis Into Opportunity

When the MTN commercial paper went live in June 2020, Nigeria was still in lockdown. The economy was contracting. Unemployment was rising. Consumer confidence was at multi-year lows.

And yet: over 400% subscription growth.

How?

The Perfect Storm of Demand and Access

Pent-up demand met digital access for the first time. Nigerians wanted investment opportunities but had been locked out by physical infrastructure requirements. MTN was a household name; investing in MTN felt safe. And retail investors could now participate from their phones or computers, at home, with minimal friction.

But demand alone doesn’t create 400% growth. Execution does.

The platform didn’t crash under load. Payments processed smoothly. KYC verification happened quickly. Users who started the process actually completed it, because the experience was designed to eliminate drop-off points.

The Technical Decisions That Made the Difference

Several technical and strategic decisions were pivotal:

Web-First for Speed to Market: Rather than trying to build a full mobile app under extreme time pressure, the team built a mobile-responsive web platform that could be deployed quickly and accessed from any device.

Progressive Disclosure: Rather than overwhelming users with information upfront, the platform revealed complexity gradually. Core actions were simple; advanced features were available but not intrusive.

Redundancy Everywhere: Every critical system had a backup. Payment gateway fails? Route through the alternative. The platform was architected for resilience in an environment where infrastructure isn’t reliable.

Real-Time Data Visibility: Kenny insisted on dashboards that showed real-time user behavior, conversion rates, and technical performance. This allowed the team to identify and fix issues within hours, not days.

Human Backup for Digital Processes: Despite being a digital-first product, the team maintained human support channels. When automation failed or users got confused, real people were available to help.

The Proof of Concept That Changed Everything

The success of the MTN commercial paper wasn’t just about one transaction. It proved something fundamental: Nigerian retail investors were ready for digital capital markets access, and the infrastructure could be built to support it.

The 400% subscription growth validated the model. But more importantly, it provided the blueprint and confidence for what came next: a full mobile-first IPO application.

The lessons learned from the commercial paper deployment directly informed the development of Nigeria’s first digital IPO app:

• User accessibility principles from the web form translated to mobile interface design
• Mobile optimization insights from watching how users accessed the web platform on their phones
• Scalability requirements identified during the commercial paper surge
• Regulatory frameworks established with the SEC during the initial deployment
• Payment infrastructure resilience tested under real load conditions

In December 2021, that IPO app was deployed for Nigeria’s first fully digital IPO transaction. The infrastructure Kenny and her team built with the commercial paper became the foundation for how capital markets could operate in a digital-first world.

The ripple effects: retail investor participation in capital markets increased dramatically, barriers to entry for first-time investors dropped significantly, other financial institutions began racing to build similar digital infrastructure, and regulatory frameworks evolved to accommodate digital-first securities trading.

What started as a crisis response became a permanent market transformation.

The Lessons: What This Means for Product Leaders

Crisis Reveals What’s Actually Necessary: The pandemic forced Chapel Hill Denham to strip away everything that wasn’t essential. Question your assumptions about what’s “required” vs. what’s just a legacy process.

Speed to Market Sometimes Trumps Perfect Solutions: The team shipped a web-based solution in weeks rather than spending months building a full mobile app. That pragmatism was the difference between capturing the opportunity and missing it entirely.

Prove the Concept Before Building the Cathedral: The commercial paper web form proved that digital capital markets access could work in Nigeria. That proof of concept gave stakeholders confidence to invest in the more sophisticated IPO app later.

User Experience Trumps Feature Complexity: The platform that won wasn’t the one with the most features; it was the one that made the core user journey frictionless.

Infrastructure Matters More Than Innovation: The “innovative” part wasn’t the idea of digital subscriptions. It was building infrastructure that actually worked, integrations that didn’t break, payments that processed reliably, and KYC that satisfied regulators.

Trust Is Built Through Reliability, Not Marketing: Nigerian users adopted the platform because it worked consistently. Trust came from operational excellence, not advertising spend.

The Numbers That Mattered

• 400%+ subscription growth on the MTN commercial paper
• 98% functionality test result before launch
• 200 direct sales staff employed to support customer acquisition
• Proof of concept that led to Nigeria’s first digital IPO app (deployed December 2021)
• Thousands of first-time retail investors were given access to capital markets
• Blueprint established for digital-first securities trading in Nigeria

But the most important number isn’t quantifiable: permanent market transformation.

Why This Case Study Matters

The story of the MTN commercial paper digital subscription platform isn’t just about fintech innovation. It’s about what becomes possible when you combine technical competence, strategic thinking, user empathy, and execution discipline under immense pressure.

It’s proof that emerging markets don’t need to wait for perfect infrastructure or ideal conditions to build world-class digital products. Sometimes the constraints force the kind of creative problem-solving that leads to genuine breakthroughs.

It’s a reminder that you don’t always need to build the perfect solution from day one. Sometimes, a well-executed web form that ships fast beats a beautiful mobile app that ships late. Prove the concept, learn from real users, then iterate toward the ideal.

Kenny Ejukorlem and her team didn’t just build a subscription form. They proved that digital financial inclusion at scale was possible in Nigeria. They gave stakeholders the confidence to invest in more sophisticated infrastructure. And they built the foundation for a market transformation that’s still unfolding today.

The commercial paper came first. The IPO app came later. But the boldness, the willingness to build something new when the world was falling apart, that’s what changed everything.

Kehinde (Kenny) Ejukorlem is a digital transformation and product innovation leader with over 15 years of experience driving technology-led growth across healthcare, fintech, and financial services. She has held senior roles at AXA Health UK, Avon HMO, Chapel Hill Denham, and Diamond Bank, leading landmark initiatives like the MTN Nigeria public offer and InvestNaija , which revolutionised retail investment access through digital innovation.

Kenny combines deep expertise in strategy, product development, and AI/ML with a passion for mentoring startups and championing diversity in tech. Her work continues to shape customer-centric, data-driven digital ecosystems globally.

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