Monkey Business

Once upon a time in a village, a man appeared and announced that he would buy monkeys for $10.
The villagers went out to the forest and started catching them. The man bought thousands at $10. As monkeys became scarce, he upped the price to $20. This renewed the efforts of the villagers. Soon the supply diminished again.
The offer rate increased to $25 and the supply of monkeys became so little that it was an effort to even see a monkey, let alone catch it! The man now announced that he would buy monkeys at $100! However, since he had to go to the city on some business, his assistant would now buy on his behalf.
In the man’s absence, the assistant said to the villagers: “Look at all these monkeys in the big cage that the man has collected. I will sell them to you at $75 each and when the man returns from the city, you can sell them to him for $100 each.” The villagers brought out their life savings and bought all the monkeys.
Thereafter, they never saw the man nor his assistant again—only monkeys everywhere!

Author: Adedeji Olowe

Adédèjì is the founder of Lendsqr, the loan infrastructure fintech powering lenders at scale. Before this, he led Trium Limited, the corporate VC of the Coronation Group, which invested in Woven Finance, Sparkle Bank, Clane, and L1ght, amongst others. He has almost two decades of banking experience, including stints as the Divisional Head of Electronic Banking at Fidelity Bank Plc. He drove the turnaround of the bank’s digital business. He was previously responsible for United Bank for Africa Group’s payment card business across 19 countries. Alongside other industry veterans, he founded Open Banking Nigeria, the nonprofit driving the development and adoption of a common API standard for the Nigerian financial industry. Beyond open APIs, Adédèjì works deeply within the fintech ecosystem; he’s the board chairman at Paystack. Adédèjì is a renowned fintech pundit and has been blogging on technology and payments at dejiolowe.com since 2001.

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