Before he became the executive responsible for securing millions of daily financial transactions flowing across Africa, Muyiwa Olufon was the professional Nike trusted to defend its digital infrastructure across six continents. As Senior Director, Global Information Security at Nike and Converse — a Fortune 100 mandate — Olufon defined and executed the company's worldwide information security strategy, directly managing CISOs for China, Korea, EMEA, Asia Pacific, and North America. That career foundation shaped his approach to one of Africa's most critical security mandates: as Chief Information Security Officer at Flutterwave, the Lagos-founded payments unicorn. Today, he is channelling that same discipline into a new venture — co-founding Turing Tower, an AI-powered cybersecurity and risk management platform engineered specifically for emerging markets.
Olufon's tenure at Flutterwave positioned him at the intersection of Africa's payments infrastructure, regulatory complexity, and evolving threat landscapes. Flutterwave processes millions of transactions daily, serves merchants from Lagos to Nairobi to Cairo, and operates under simultaneous regulatory scrutiny from Nigeria's Central Bank, Kenya's Central Bank, and multiple international financial intelligence frameworks. The CISO who sits at that intersection must think in regulatory languages, threat landscapes, and risk architectures simultaneously — exactly the literacy Olufon spent 15 years building Source: Muyiwa Olufon – Personal Website.
The Career That Made the Appointment Inevitable
Olufon's trajectory from Lagos to the top of global enterprise security is not a story of linear ascent — it is a story of deliberate accumulation. He began in Nigeria: senior security engineering roles at Standard Bank Nigeria, Access Bank Africa Region, and technology firms including Sopranet Limited and Cobalt Limited. Those early years grounded him in the specific texture of African financial infrastructure — its constraints, its regulatory patchwork, its exposure to fraud vectors that Western security playbooks rarely anticipate.
From Nigeria, he moved into European enterprise at scale. Between 2015 and 2019, he led a £25 million-plus ERP cloud migration programme, coaching a team of more than 150 architects and engineers through one of the most operationally complex transitions in enterprise IT. That programme-management discipline fed directly into his next appointment: Head of Global Information Security Operations at Adidas Group, where he ran cybersecurity across 60-plus countries, commanding a multi-million euro budget and directing teams spanning Security Operations Centres, Vulnerability Management, Firewall Governance, Cloud Security, Threat Intelligence, and Advanced Endpoint Protection Source: Vaste Holdings – Muyiwa Olufon Profile.
Adidas gave him global scale. Nike gave him strategic altitude. Appointed Director of EMEA Information Security in 2020 and promoted to Senior Director of Global Information Security in 2022, Olufon operated at the intersection of geopolitics and corporate risk — managing security posture across jurisdictions with radically different data sovereignty laws, threat actor profiles, and regulatory expectations. His concurrent role as Board Security Advisor at Flutterwave from 2020 to 2023 was not a sideline; it was the bridge that would eventually bring him home.
Credentials That Demand Attention
Olufon's formal recognition matches the trajectory. He is a Fellow of the British Computer Society (FBCS), one of the UK's most prestigious technology professional honours. He was appointed Visiting Expert on Cybersecurity at the European Institute of Public Administration — training and advising public-sector leaders across Europe on advanced security governance Source: European Institute of Public Administration – Expert Profile. He sits on the Forbes Technology Council as a published contributor on cybersecurity strategy Source: Forbes Technology Council – Muyiwa Olufon Profile.
Academically, Olufon graduated from the University of Cambridge Executive MBA programme with the Class of 2023 — featured in the Cambridge Judge Business School class profile. He also holds postgraduate enrolment at King's College London, two bachelor's degrees from the University of Worcester and the University of Portsmouth, and alumni status at Yale School of Management's Advanced Management Programme. More than 20 industry certifications complete a portfolio that few cybersecurity executives on any continent can match.
His board seat at Backbone Infrastructure Nigeria Limited (BINL) — a supervisory governance role over Nigerian critical infrastructure — signals that Olufon's commitment to African security extends across multiple institutional layers. He is actively channelling global enterprise security doctrine into the governance layers of Nigeria's physical and digital infrastructure stack Source: Backbone Infrastructure Nigeria Limited – Supervisory Board.
Why This Matters for African Fintech Security
Flutterwave is not simply a Nigerian startup that scaled — it is the payment backbone connecting African merchants, diaspora remittance flows, and global commerce. A security failure at Flutterwave is not a company-level event; it is a systemic shock to the African digital payments ecosystem, affecting developers building on its APIs, merchants in Accra and Kigali depending on its settlement rails, and regulators in Abuja and Nairobi who have staked credibility on the viability of African fintech.
The structural challenge Olufon encountered during his tenure at Flutterwave is that African fintechs have historically scaled faster than their security architectures matured — a rational choice in growth phases, but one that creates compounding exposure as transaction volumes, regulatory obligations, and threat actor sophistication all rise simultaneously. His appointment as CISO brought the discipline of Fortune 100 security programmes — organisations that faced nation-state threats, insider risk, and regulatory enforcement across dozens of jurisdictions — directly to bear on that structural lag.
From Flutterwave to Turing Tower: Scaling Security Doctrine for Emerging Markets
Olufon's departure from Flutterwave marked the beginning of a new chapter: the co-founding of Turing Tower, an AI-powered cybersecurity and risk management platform purpose-built for emerging markets. Turing Tower automates threat detection, monitors human behavioral risk, and ensures regulatory compliance across sectors including finance and healthcare — precisely the infrastructure gaps that Olufon identified while operating at the intersection of African fintech scale and global security architecture.
The platform represents a strategic pivot: rather than securing a single payments unicorn, Olufon is now architecting defensive infrastructure for the ecosystem itself. This approach acknowledges a critical reality — that emerging-market organisations face distinct threat landscapes, regulatory patchworks, and resource constraints that standard enterprise cybersecurity products were not engineered to address. By embedding AI-driven automation and behavioral risk monitoring into Turing Tower's core design, Olufon is translating the defensive wisdom he accumulated across Nike, Adidas, and Flutterwave into tools accessible to the continent's broader fintech, financial services, and healthcare sectors.
What is already evident: Africa's payments infrastructure benefited from Olufon's presence at Flutterwave. The continent's emerging-market enterprises now have access to the defensive capabilities he is encoding into Turing Tower — a platform designed from first principles to address the security and compliance challenges that characterised his earlier roles. For a continent where fintech is the primary engine of financial inclusion — from Lagos to Lusaka, Dar es Salaam to Dakar — that calibre of defensive innovation is not a luxury. It is infrastructure.