By Christiana Bassey

There is a question I come back to at every stage of the product development process, no matter which Zone product I am working on: Who is this actually built for?

It sounds simple. But in digital payments, it is one of the most consequential questions you can ask. Because the history of financial infrastructure is, in many ways, a history of who got left out. Women. Informal traders. Smallholder businesses. People in markets that were deemed too complex, too risky, or simply not worth the investment.

At Zone Payment Network, our mission is to connect every monetary store of value by harnessing the power of blockchain technology. That word ‘’every’’  is the most important word in our mission. And as a Product Manager working across Zone’s suite of products, it is the word I hold myself accountable to every single day.

The Gap Between ‘Available’ and ‘Accessible’

Digital payments have expanded dramatically across Africa. More people have mobile phones. More merchants have POS terminals. More banks are building apps. And yet, for millions of people, women disproportionately among them, the system still feels like it was not designed with them in mind.

There is a difference between a product being available and a product being accessible. Availability means the product exists. Accessibility means it was built with the user’s real life in mind; their literacy level, their device, their trust barriers, their relationship with formal financial institutions. When we build without asking who we are building for, we default to the user we imagine. That imagined user is often not a woman in Lagos, or Kano, or Enugu, managing a household budget and a small business simultaneously.

Frictionless operations is a Zone value proposition for our institutional partners, but I think about it equally as a promise to end users. Automated reconciliation and settlement should not just save banks time; it should mean that the woman receiving a transfer from her customer gets her money faster, with fewer errors, and without needing to visit a branch to resolve a dispute.

Being a Woman Who Builds the Bridge

I want to be honest about what it means to be a woman in product management in the fintech space. The rooms are getting more diverse, but they are not there yet. There are still moments where you have to say your idea twice before it lands. Still moments where you wonder if the pushback is about the idea or about who is presenting it.

What I have found at Zone is a culture that values Innovation, moving ideas from fringe to mainstream and breaking unnecessary conventions. That mandate has given me space to challenge assumptions in the product process, to ask uncomfortable questions about who we are designing for, and to advocate for users who will not be in the room when design decisions are made.

I have also found that being a woman who has experienced friction in financial systems, who has waited in queues, been declined without explanation, navigated opaque processes makes me a better product manager. That lived experience is not a liability. It is a design asset.

Inclusion Is a Product Decision, not a PR One

This International Women’s Month, I want to gently challenge the way our industry tends to talk about inclusion. Too often, it surfaces as a campaign, a statistic in a report, a panel at a conference, a social media post in March. Real inclusion in digital payments is quieter and harder than that. It lives in the user research process. It lives in who is in the room when personas are built. It lives in whether the team building the product reflects the diversity of the people it is meant to serve.

Zone’s vision is one global network to pay anyone, through any means, in any currency. That ‘anyone’ is a product requirement, not an aspiration. Every feature we ship, every flow we simplify, every friction point we remove is a step toward making that vision real for the people who have been waiting the longest for it.

So, Who Is This Product Really For?

It is for the trader in an open market who needs to receive payments instantly without cash handling risk. It is for the woman who has been told, in a hundred quiet ways, that the financial system was not built with her in mind.

At Zone, we are building the infrastructure to change that, and I am proud to be one of the women helping to decide what it looks like.