Olufemi Olaogun is raising the bar with FCA-licensed SendOva, offering better rates and zero fees from the UK to Nigeria. By Adenike Ibirogba, Date: 12 June 2026, 7:24am WAT.
A Personal Mission Born from Experience
For many immigrants, sending money home is more than a transaction. It is school fees, medical bills, rent, family support, and a way to stay connected to loved ones thousands of miles away. For Olufemi Olaogun, founder of SendOva, that reality is deeply personal. Growing up in Gowon Estate, Egbeda, Lagos, a neighborhood that shaped his grit, problem-solving skills, and sense of community, Olufemi learned early the value of hard work. His mother, a teacher, believed education was the only door worth walking through. When the opportunity came to further his studies in the United Kingdom in 2004, he seized it.
Like millions of migrants, he worked hard, supported his family back home, and regularly sent money across borders. But he was surprised by how expensive and frustrating the process was. “Every time I sent money home, I felt like a portion of it disappeared before it ever reached the people it was intended for,” he recalls. “Between hidden fees, poor exchange rates and delays, it often felt like the system was working against the customer.” This experience shaped his professional journey and sparked the vision for SendOva.
The Man Behind the Mission
Olufemi spent over two decades building expertise across demanding financial environments, including Nigeria, the UK, Europe, Asia, Canada, and the United States. He worked in cross-border payments and fintech, gaining an insider’s understanding of why cross-border money movement is broken. What sets him apart is not just his years of experience, but what those years taught him to see: every inefficiency and unjustified delay as failures that someone had the obligation to fix. For Olufemi, transparency is not a feature; it is the foundation of trust. “I didn’t set out to build a fintech company. I set out to solve a problem I had lived through myself, standing on the other side of a broken system, trying to send money home to the people who sacrificed for me to be here.”
What Makes SendOva Special
SendOva’s proposition is deliberately simple but impactful, built on four pillars: transparent pricing, zero transfer fees, competitive exchange rates, and fast, reliable transfers. Customers view the live exchange rate before each transaction, knowing exactly what they send and what their recipient will receive. No charges are buried in the fine print. SendOva offers better rates than top competitors, providing a reliable, fast, and trustworthy app experience. Whether it is a finance professional in Manchester paying school fees in Lagos or a small business owner in London settling a supplier in Kano, the need is the same: money that arrives quickly, in full, with no surprises.
Regulation as a Foundation
SendOva is the trading name of Balazoo Express Ltd, a UK payment institution registered with the Financial Conduct Authority and supervised for anti-money laundering compliance by HMRC. Headquartered in Canary Wharf, London, the company understands that price alone does not win the diaspora sender. This community has been burned by platforms that promised speed but delivered delays, or advertised zero fees but buried costs in the rate. Regulatory oversight is the level of verification diaspora customers have earned the right to demand before trusting an app with their family’s money.
The Road Ahead
SendOva is expanding into Ghana and Kenya, leveraging its robust infrastructure, compliance architecture, and rate transparency model established on its UK to Nigeria foundation. Olaogun frames this not as a growth strategy but as the same mission extended to every diaspora community that has quietly absorbed the same injustice in different corridors.
More Than a Transfer
For Olufemi Olaogun, SendOva is not simply another fintech app competing for market share in a crowded remittance market. It is the culmination of more than two decades spent understanding how money moves, where value is lost, and why migrants are often forced to pay the highest price for supporting the people they love. Every transfer tells a story: a son supporting ageing parents, a family funding a medical emergency, or a small business owner settling suppliers back home. SendOva was built on the belief that those moments are too important to be diminished by hidden fees, poor exchange rates, or unnecessary delays. The mission is simple: help migrants keep more of what they earn and ensure more of it reaches the people who matter most. “Every time someone uses SendOva to send money home, they’re not just making a transfer. They’re choosing not to be taken advantage of. That’s what we built this for.”
