How Oluwemimo Richard-Ekpu’s WemTrack is rewriting Africa’s regulatory playbook

In Africa’s high-velocity financial landscape, innovation frequently outruns regulation, and sometimes crashes into it. From digital wallets to cross-border remittances, payments infrastructure is evolving faster than the policies that govern it, leaving banks, fintechs, and regulators locked in a constant scramble to keep pace.

Into this chaos steps WemTrack, the brainchild of Oluwemimo Richard-Ekpu, a Nigerian entrepreneur betting big on a bold proposition: turning compliance from an afterthought into a competitive advantage.

“Compliance is not paperwork. It’s infrastructure,” Ekpu says with the conviction of someone trying to change an industry’s mindset. Her Lagos-based startup is building what it calls a Regulatory Intelligence Layer (RIL), a programmable framework designed to detect, decode, and respond to shifting regulatory rules in real time.

From alerts to action

At its core, WemTrack acts like a Bloomberg Terminal for regulation. It monitors rulebooks from central banks, card networks like Visa and Mastercard, and payments regulators across African markets. Every change — from new anti-money-laundering thresholds to interchange fee updates is tagged by jurisdiction, risk category, and operational impact.

The platform doesn’t stop at alerts. It is evolving toward predictive analytics, capable of modelling how new policies might affect different institution types. It aims to integrate with internal tools like Jira or Notion, turning compliance updates into actionable workflows rather than inbox clutter.

“We want to make compliance programmable. Predictable. Actionable,” says Ekpu. “And we want to do it for the African market first.”

Solving Africa’s compliance pain points

The pain WemTrack addresses is real. African financial institutions are drowning in a “firehose” of policy changes — from the Central Bank of Nigeria’s shifting FX controls to global anti-fraud measures imposed by card schemes.

“You get a firehose of change logs, but it’s still your job to figure out what matters,” says the head of compliance at a mid-sized Nigerian bank that piloted the platform. “WemTrack helps prioritise, but it still requires expertise to act on.”

This power-user skew is both a strength and a weakness. The platform offers unprecedented visibility, but in markets where compliance teams are understaffed and in-house legal expertise is thin, its learning curve may limit widespread adoption without further simplification.

A dual-track ambition: intelligence + infrastructure

WemTrack’s ambitions go beyond tracking regulation. Ekpu envisions a future where regulatory intelligence underpins Africa’s push for payment sovereignty.

Part of the startup’s roadmap includes supporting domestic card schemes that bypass foreign rails entirely — reducing costs and giving local regulators more control over monetary policy, FX flows, and even subsidy distribution.

“We don’t need a Visa to pay for suya or NEPA bills,” Ekpu quips — half joke, half manifesto. The idea is a two-rail system: seamlessly switch between domestic and international rails, underpinned by programmable compliance. If successful, WemTrack could become not just a tool for banks but part of Nigeria’s broader financial infrastructure strategy.

Big vision, tough execution

The ambition is audacious and fraught with challenges. To succeed, WemTrack must: Shift from “what changed?” to “what do we do?” quickly, adding actionable guidance, risk modeling, and automated routing into existing bank workflows; Earn trust from regulators like the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and Nigerian Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS), providing dashboards that serve both compliance teams and oversight bodies without sacrificing agility.

And blend technology with legal nuance, recruiting not just world-class engineers but analysts fluent in interpreting dense rulebooks and anticipating their real-world impact — a rare and costly talent mix.

Timing is everything

The startup’s timing may be fortuitous. Nigeria’s financial sector is undergoing sweeping reforms: recapitalisation mandates for banks, FX liberalisation, and an aggressive push toward cashless payments. Each shift generates new regulatory obligations — and opportunities for tools like WemTrack to provide clarity amid the noise.

By auto-tagging rules across schemes and jurisdictions, WemTrack is already helping institutions reduce compliance fatigue. Its predictive analytics, still in early stages, promise to forecast policy impacts, turning compliance from a reactive scramble into a strategic advantage.

From knowing to doing

For now, WemTrack remains a work in progress, ambitious in scope, fragmented in execution, and racing to mature fast enough to meet demand. But Ekpu’s vision is clear: transform regulatory opacity into actionable intelligence, and, in the process, give African innovators the infrastructure to lead rather than merely survive policy shifts.

“Africa doesn’t just need tools to survive regulation,” she says. “We need tools that help us lead it.”

If WemTrack can bridge that gap, from knowing to doing, it could emerge not just as a startup but as a cornerstone of Africa’s next financial chapter.