The Boldness to Automate

Emeka Emetarom is the Co-founder and CEO of Qore, a company focused on providing cloud core banking platforms that drive financial inclusion for underserved institutions. With a background spanning chemical engineering, airtime distribution, and the development of some of Nigeria’s earliest banking software, Emeka’s journey is a relentless pursuit of digitisation and automation. In this story, he reflects on the hidden curriculum of university life, the constant fear of external limits, and why boldness is the only skill necessary for success.

From Chaos to the Call for Clarity

I was born in Ibadan and grew up in the East. I studied Chemical Engineering at FUTO, primarily because I was told my brother, Obi, was already pursuing Computer Engineering, and we were the only two boys in the family. I went through school and ended up back in tech. But first, I started a pure water distribution business.

What drew me to financial services was the profound inefficiency. We were pushing solutions to commercial banks, but they weren’t applying them in a scalable way. We used to say, “Solutions don’t go live.” We saw an affiliate module we built for microfinance banks (MFIs) that allowed their customers to load prepaid cards. However, if a customer needed more money, they were stuck, having to call the MFI to reload it. Terrible UX. We realized the core problem: MFIs—the guys powering the real sector and lending to MSMEs—didn’t even have proper technology. Most were on paper or Excel.

That was the moment: someone had to fix this. We set out to build BankOne, a cloud core banking platform with a low barrier to entry. Our consistent emotional thesis across all ventures is digitization and automation. Faster equals more productivity. Lower cost equals more resources for investment. Finance is foundational, and automation is the only way economies grow.

The Unbreakable Spirit: How to Stomach the Worst

There has never been a time when I thought I should quit. The challenges now don’t feel harder than what I’ve already lived through.

When I was selling pure water, I didn’t understand the business at all. I thought I could forecast profitability on an Excel sheet, but I ran straight into the Lagos rainy season. One day, stuck in heavy rain and traffic for hours, soaked and cold in the truck, I just thought: “This is the process. You just keep going.”

In AppZone, we’ve had moments where we paid partial salaries, depleted all accounts, and drove home for Christmas break with zero funds for diesel in January. Yet, as I was driving back to Lagos, a project we’d been chasing got approved, and funds were in by the time we arrived. It’s like no matter how close we get to the edge, it never breaks us. We’ve seen far worse.

The most profound lesson about resilience I’ve learned is that you have no idea how much you can stomach until you’re forced to. We had a core banking migration go bad for one of our biggest clients. One million accounts down for a week. We slept two hours a day for a whole week. When we got everything back up, I realized: “Oh, we didn’t break. Okay then.”

The Unseen Weight of Promise

A big fear that keeps me up is this: we need the most talented people [to work with], people with global options. They join because they buy into the vision—they are taking a bet. Their stock options, their sacrifice—it all has to be worth it. But there are also environment-based limitations we can’t control, like Nigeria’s GDP per capita. The fear is that after doing everything right, external limits might still prevent us from delivering on the promise these people bet their lives on.

This journey has been extremely taxing relationally and on sleep. Most people can clock out at 6 PM; for me, 6 PM feels like halftime. Because I cannot trade relationships, family, or health, sleep is always the casualty. I will sacrifice nothing else for sleep unless I’m physically crashing. In my leadership, I insist on excellence. No shortcuts. We always insist on doing the best possible thing. I will take a smart mind over raw experience any day. Experience is memorized responses; intelligence solves.

The Final Lesson: The Power of Boldness

The single biggest flaw I’ve had to confront is coming off as emotionally robotic. Because I see everything as fleeting—just biochemical processes—my instinct when people are overwhelmed is to go, “Relax. This isn’t real. Shrug it off.” This is not empathy; it comes off as a rigid correction of emotion. I’ve had to literally undergo training to fix it.

A part of my story that people rarely see is that my real education came from organizing parties in university. Planning, execution, stakes, people management, resilience, improvisation—it was all there.

If I could write a private note to my younger self, it would say: “Be bold.” The way life works is that reality conforms to the desires and wills of the bold. Smart people who aren’t bold start doubting themselves. The less you know, the more you just move.

My final goal is not about the money; I’m driven by solving problems. We want the business to keep growing and delivering value across Africa. Legacy-wise, I want to prove that what we’ve built keeps growing and delivering value. And I see myself as a vessel. Hopefully, that picture influences the way others choose to live, build, and lead.