Inside Nezz: Oluwalopeye “Lopsii” Olagoke Is Looking Beyond Faster Payments

The financial technology world loves speed. Real-time payments, stablecoins, embedded finance, programmable money, and modern settlement infrastructure have become some of the loudest conversations in the industry. Faster movement matters. Better rails matter. Cleaner systems matter. Oluwalopeye “Lopsii” Olagoke does not dismiss any of it.

He just thinks the conversation skips over the part where many transactions actually get stuck. The founder of Nezz believes the next major shift in financial infrastructure will not come from payment rails alone. It will come from improving the space between agreement and settlement, especially in transactions where several parties must confirm details, release funds, approve steps, and trust that the process is moving correctly.

“A payment can be fast, and the transaction can still be difficult,” Olagoke says. “That is the distinction I think more people need to make.”

That distinction sits at the center of Nezz, the company Olagoke is building to improve escrow, milestone payments, and high-value transaction workflows. His view is direct: financial infrastructure has made real progress on movement, but many businesses still rely on outdated processes around the transaction itself.

In simple terms, money may have better roads now, but the handoffs around that money can still be messy.

“Most people think financial infrastructure is a payment problem,” Olagoke says. “I see it as a coordination problem. The payment matters, but the process around it often decides whether the transaction works smoothly.”

That argument comes from years spent close to financial operations. Before Nezz, Olagoke founded and scaled Attendify, a billing and compliance company that enabled more than $90 million in billing and payouts. That work gave him a practical look at what happens when money movement depends on people, systems, compliance requirements, and timing, all lining up.

The more he worked inside those systems, the more he noticed the same weak spots.

“Once multiple parties are involved, the issue becomes bigger than whether funds can technically move,” he says. “It becomes a question of who has visibility, who has control, and whether the process can keep up with the transaction.”

That is where Olagoke believes the industry’s current obsession with speed can become too narrow. A transaction can have access to faster payment methods and still suffer from poor coordination. A business can have funds ready and still lose time waiting for approvals, confirmations, or settlement steps. A process can look modern from the outside while still depending on manual follow-up behind the scenes.

Those gaps are especially visible in high-value transactions. These are not casual transfers. They often involve serious capital, regulated steps, and stakeholders who need certainty before money changes hands. One missing update or unclear handoff can create delays that ripple across the whole transaction.

“The transaction layer has not received the same level of attention as the payment layer,” Olagoke says. “That is where I think a lot of the opportunity is.”

Nezz is being built around that opportunity. The company is developing infrastructure for escrow, milestone payment, and high-value transactions, with the goal of giving businesses a clearer way to manage the path from transaction agreement to final settlement. Instead of treating payment movement as a separate event, Nezz is focused on the broader flow that surrounds it.

The company is still moving toward its first deployments, but it has already developed early signals of demand. Nezz has an early transaction pipeline representing approximately $300 million in potential transaction volume, a letter of intent from a manufacturing company, and ongoing pilot and infrastructure partnership discussions across multiple industries. It has also established banking infrastructure through Wells Fargo via Priority, and its founding team brings experience from RBC, Interac, Deloitte, CIBC, Haventree Bank, and global payments infrastructure.

Escrow, milestone payments, and high-value transaction infrastructure cannot be treated like a light operational tool. The stakes are too high. The movement of money is too sensitive. The users are too aware of what can go wrong.

“People are careful in this industry for good reason,” he says. “If you are asking a business to change how it handles important transactions, you have to understand the risk they carry every day.”

That is why customer discovery has shaped Nezz from the beginning. Olagoke has spent significant time speaking with title companies, manufacturers, enterprises, and financial infrastructure providers. The goal was not to validate a pitch. It was to understand where the process truly breaks.

He says that work changed how he thinks about building.

“Some assumptions sound smart until you sit with the people responsible for the workflow,” Olagoke says. “They show you what is actually happening. They show you which delays are painful, which steps are unclear, and which problems everyone has learned to tolerate.”

Olagoke believes some of the most persistent problems in financial infrastructure remain in place because people have adjusted around them. Teams create workarounds. They chase updates. They manage risk with extra communication. They build habits around gaps instead of replacing the system that created them.

Over time, that friction can start to feel normal.

“Some inefficiencies survive because they become familiar,” he says. “People stop treating them as design problems and start treating them as part of the job.”

Nezz is Olagoke’s answer to that familiarity. The company is not trying to make a broken process look cleaner on the surface. Its bigger ambition is to help businesses rethink how transaction steps, capital movement, visibility, and settlement should operate together.

That approach also explains why Olagoke describes himself as a practitioner first. He regularly shares insights on financial infrastructure, escrow, and transaction workflows, but he does not frame his authority around commentary. He frames it around building, operating, listening, and testing ideas against real customer needs.

His advice to other founders is simple because it came from that experience.

“Talk to customers earlier and more often than you think you need to,” he says. “The closer you stay to the problem, the harder it becomes to build something superficial.”

The broader industry may continue to celebrate faster money movement, and Olagoke agrees that speed will remain important. He simply believes speed is not the full answer. The next chapter of financial infrastructure will require a more complete view of the transaction itself.

That means asking different questions. Where does the process lose visibility? Which handoffs still depend on manual coordination? Which funds are waiting because the surrounding workflow is too slow? Which parts of settlement feel opaque because they were never designed for real-time clarity?

For Olagoke, those questions point to the future of financial infrastructure.

“The industry has done a lot of work on how money moves,” he says. “Now we need to improve how transactions move with it.”

For more information on Oluwalopeye “Lopsii” Olagoke, visit his LinkedIn.