Nelson Korshi Da Seglah, Founder, Halges (Korba)
The rain fell in sheets, mirroring the torrent of frustration that surged through Nelson Korshi Da Seglah. There he stood, the seasoned technology architect, in the serpentine queue amidst his Ghanaian brothers, each clutching hard-earned cash, waiting to send money to their loved ones.
It was 2014, and he had just buried his father—a man whose final wish to rest in their ancestral hometown of Angola had led Korshi through a maze of logistical nightmares. While transferring money to his cousin, he fell victim to the traditional process of money transfer, which felt clunky and outdated. Hours they would lose in the sprawling queue, withdraw cash from the bank, join a sweaty throng at a mobile money kiosk, and pray the agent could handle the transaction. When asked, the agent retorted with impassive calm that he could only send a third of the amount! Frustration boiled over. “Why can’t we move money directly from a bank account to a mobile wallet?” Korshi muttered.
This simple question, born of frustration and empathy, became the genesis of Korba, Ghana’s pioneering interoperable digital payments platform.
Building the Foundation: From Factory to Finance
Success stories often come wrapped in glossy highlights, but the path to them is rarely linear. Born in 1975, Korshi grew up navigating a world where remittances were a gamble. Parents abroad entrusted cash to strangers, only for it to vanish—a reality he faced firsthand. “The first hundred clients of Ghana’s earliest remittance firm? Probably me,” Korshi recalls wryly. These scars instilled a resolve to reimagine how money moves.
At the University of Ghana, where Korshi studied Computer Science and Physics, his final project—a 2000 e-commerce platform—stalled when professors asked, “How will people pay?” The gap between innovation and infrastructure haunted him.
Years later, maneuvering the winding path through the corridors of corporate giants like Unilever and the nascent financial landscape of Unique Trust, Da Seglah sought to address a fundamental failure: the inability to move money seamlessly. At Unilever, he engineered systems to track products nationwide, even creating a global database for manufacturing. At UT Bank (later collapsed), he worked hard with the team to slash loan processing to less than 48 hours and built Ghana’s first deposit-taking ATMs. Each role honed his vision: financial access as a right, not a privilege.
“That’s how the whole experience and what brought me into the fintech industry to try and resolve payments and ease lives for people, to save people time from doing the payment, transferring money and doing remittances”, shares Korshi.
The Birth of Korba: “A Suicide Mission”
In 2014, N. Korshi Da Seglah made the decision to walk away from the stability of banking into a landscape riddled with doubt. Mobile money was still in its infancy in Ghana, digital infrastructure was patchy, and faith in tech-driven finance wore thin. Ghana’s financial ecosystem was fragmented — banks, mobile wallets, and cards operated in silos forcing users to juggle apps and queues. Skeptics dismissed his vision of a unified payment platform as folly. “Entrepreneurship can be a suicide mission, but it is attainable once you have a focus on what you want to achieve and once you keep your focus on it,” Korshi admits, as he reflects on his early days of sleepless nights automating codes, rallying a team with sheer conviction and surviving on borrowed time.
With Korba, he wagered everything. This single platform stitched each fragment together and made them work in unison. “We didn’t just build tech. We built trust,” Korshi says. Suddenly, a mother could pay her child’s school fees via mobile money straight from her bank account; a farmer could receive payments digitally without switching apps. By 2022, Korba’s infrastructure processed millions of transactions, honoring N. Korshi Da Seglah as Ghana’s Fintech Personality of the Year.
Leadership and Impact: Touching Lives
As a leader, Korshi’s empathy and self-awareness have always guided his mission. As the team expanded, he shifted to empowering talent, blending technical rigor with empathy. For him, financial metrics cannot be the yardstick for measuring true success that often stems from breaking barriers and transforming lives by making a tangible impact. “I’m a builder, not a salesman,” he admits. In 2025, he stepped down as CEO, becoming Chief Solutions Architect to focus on innovation, while a commercial leader scaled operations.
The Future: A Continent Within Reach
Today, Korba eyes pan-African expansion, targeting four new countries by 2024. Korshi’s new role fuels his passion: crafting blockchain solutions and AI-driven tools to democratize finance. But his metric of success remains human. “Within 100 meters, every African should access financial services,” he declares. It’s a bold vision, yet Korba’s journey—from a rainy-day frustration to a platform empowering millions—proves its plausibility.
Advice to Aspiring Innovators
To young technologists, Korshi offers tempered wisdom: “Make sure that your mission touches lives, it improves lives, and you see the benefits of the journey even before the journey is achieved or the ultimate is achieved.” His story, etched in resilience and empathy, reminds us that even a single, irritated question in the rain sparks off a revolution.
N. Korshi Da Seglah’s genius lies not merely in financial algorithms, but in their alchemy: turning financial friction into freedom, isolation into connection. In his new Africa, Korshi is quietly dismantling barriers so money moves not as a burden but as a bridge, and every transaction is another step towards a new dawn of progress.