Beyond Bugs: How QA at Lemonade Payments builds unshakable trust in fintech

In the fast-moving world of African fintech, where mobile money, airtime top-ups, and on-the-go merchant payments dominate, trust can be built—or broken—in seconds.

By Dumisani Sigogo

For Lemonade Payments, that trust rests on a less-visible hero: Quality Assurance (QA). Speaking exclusively to ICT Journal Africa, Allan Gogo, Lemonade’s Chief Quality Engineer, revealed that QA at the company is “not a final checkpoint, but a foundation” for everything they build.

In the fast-moving world of African fintech, where mobile money, airtime top-ups, and on-the-go merchant payments dominate, trust can be built—or broken—in seconds.

For Lemonade Payments, that trust rests on a less-visible hero: Quality Assurance (QA). Speaking exclusively to ICT Journal Africa, Allan Gogo, Lemonade’s Chief Quality Engineer, revealed that QA at the company is “not a final checkpoint, but a foundation” for everything they build.

"QA Isn’t Just Testing, It’s Trust (and maybe a bit of paranoia) At Lemonade Payments (Baobab ’24), I work in Software Quality, which means I get paid to have trust issues… professionally." “Delays or missing confirmations can destroy user confidence. We don’t just catch bugs; we anticipate them,” Gogo explained.

Lemonade’s QA team simulates real-world challenges—payment timeouts, network failures, SMS delays, and wallet limits—ensuring systems hold up even in worst-case scenarios. The approach is deeply tailored to Africa’s diverse markets, where regulations, telco infrastructure, and user behavior vary.

Tests include localized SMS behavior, differing transaction limits, UI performance on both budget and premium devices, and regional spending habits. Lemonade embeds QA across the entire product lifecycle—sprint planning, design reviews, and cross-team debugging—making “quality everyone’s job,” according to Gogo. Security and compliance are equally non-negotiable.

QA teams run fraud simulations, validate role-based access, and enforce data privacy safeguards in alignment with local laws. In recent years, cyberattacks on African fintech payment platforms have cost companies and their partners at least $14 million in confirmed losses, underscoring how costly a single breach can be.

“Our work is quiet, but the impact is loud,” Gogo said. “If we do it right, users never have to wonder if they’re safe or supported—they just know.” As fintech adoption accelerates across Africa, Lemonade Payments’ proactive, scenario-driven QA could become the model for building digital financial trust—one seamless, secure transaction at a time.