Spotlight Summary
Marie-Pierre Zingoua is a fintech growth strategist with over 17 years of experience shaping marketing, product growth, and business development across Africa’s digital finance ecosystem. Her career spans leadership roles in global institutions and high-growth fintechs, with a consistent focus on one core belief: growth works best when it is rooted in deep user understanding and disciplined execution.
She previously served as Regional Head of Marketing for West and Central Africa at Visa, where she led regional growth and market expansion across diverse and complex markets. She later joined Yango Pay, playing a critical role in scaling the e-wallet to over 500,000 users in record time, without mass media campaigns. Instead of relying on big budgets, Marie-Pierre and her team focused on clear value propositions, intuitive journeys, and trust-building for first-time digital payment users.
Today, Marie-Pierre is the Founder and Lead Consultant at MPZ Consulting, a boutique advisory firm supporting fintechs and digital finance companies across Francophone Africa, including Côte d’Ivoire, Benin, Senegal, and the DRC. Through MPZ Consulting, she helps founders and leadership teams strengthen product-market fit, design effective customer acquisition and retention strategies, and translate growth strategy into measurable, sustainable results.
Her work sits at the intersection of user insight, product strategy, and go-to-market execution, with a strong emphasis on simplicity and accessibility in emerging markets. From diagnosing growth bottlenecks to building acquisition playbooks and clarifying user journeys, Marie-Pierre works closely with teams to move from ambition to traction.
One of her proudest achievements remains the rapid scaling of Yango Pay, an experience that reinforced her philosophy on growth and adoption.
Looking ahead, Marie-Pierre is driven by fintech’s ability to create access, not only to payments, but to opportunity. Over the next five years, her vision is to help structure and strengthen the fintech ecosystem in Francophone Africa, supporting founders to build products that are simple, trustworthy, and genuinely adopted. Her personal mission is to support 100 fintechs and digital finance teams in achieving measurable traction and lasting impact across the region.
“Fintech has the power to create access; not just to payments, but to opportunity.”
Like many founders, Marie-Pierre’s journey has not been without challenges. Transitioning from corporate leadership to independent consulting required rebuilding credibility in a new context and demonstrating value through consistent, disciplined delivery, often with teams unfamiliar with structured growth frameworks. She continues to navigate this shift by relying on proven methodologies, long-term thinking, and results earned one project at a time.
Behind her journey is a strong, trusted support system, a close circle of mentors across fintech, marketing, and product whose guidance continues to shape her path.
To young women entering fintech, Marie-Pierre’s advice is grounded and empowering: start before you feel ready, stay curious, lean into the technical side, and invest in relationships alongside expertise. Because while skills open doors, networks help keep them open.
Through her work, Marie-Pierre Zingoua is helping redefine what sustainable fintech growth looks like in Africa, one built on clarity, discipline, and a deep respect for the people digital finance is meant to serve.
