Simeon Ononobi is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of ThankUCash, a technology company powering rewards and loyalty for African banks and businesses. ThankUCash serves businesses of all sizes; from startups, small retailers, and big bucks stores to banks and large organizations. These businesses all use ThankUCash’s robust platform for acquiring, rewarding and retaining customers.
Ononobi believes that tracking customers’ spending while appreciating them will go a long way to grow merchants and create a habitable community, and friendship between merchants and customers. Under his leadership, ThankUCash completed integration into over 177,000 payment terminals in Nigeria.
The Company further aims to power over 35% of loyalty and rewards programs in Africa and has started with Nigeria. They recently integrated their suite for physical stores into the point-of-sale terminals (Debit card readers) of merchants and also have partnered with African payment giant – Paystack to create a great user experience for online rewards.
Before ThankUCash, Ononobi founded Nigeria’s first online payment processor SimplePay and also created Nigeria’s first banking mobile app, GTBank mobile Velocity. He was also the brain behind the successful and highly-publicized Nigerian federal government program Youwin! With over 3 million direct and indirect beneficiaries, YouWin! was a success and as such Ononobi was called upon to develop a program for the Arts and Movie industry called Project Act Nollywood.
Ononobi has also worked with notable technocrats like Dr. Okonjo Iweala and Mr. Sam Ikoku, Rasheed Olaoluwa, Kola Aina, and many others.
Ononobi completed a bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry from the Federal University of Technology, Owerri and received certifications in software development and product development/management.
An international speaker, Ononobi has graced many stages across the world including the TEDx stage, where he gave a talk on business from a youth perspective.
Ononobi was the first African finalist and first runner at the prestigious Seedstars global competition for startups. He is presently a mentor with Google for Startups, Silicon Valley-based Founders Institute, and an alumnus of Silicon Valley-based 500 startups, Hong-Kong-based VC/Accelerator Betatron, and Los Angeles-based venture scaling accelerator.