Two BAFI Awards, One Red Carpet & A Room Full of (Wo)Men in Black

When you do good work, you expect to be noticed. 

In high school, your concern may be that your mother will ask you if your mates have two heads, because African households share your glory and shame with you. So, you do good work that everyone can see and sing about.

As adults, that praise (usually only) comes from the people you did it for — in our case, the Toniks.

And that’s just fine. 

But it’s different when recognition comes from the field where only the big boys are expected to play. The first kind tells you you’re useful; the second tells you the people who set the standard have been paying enough attention. 

So when the 14th edition of the BusinessDay Banking and other Financial Institutions (BAFI) Awards came around, and we found out we were in the running, it was pleasantly surprising news. 

(Although, in some ways, it also felt like traffic jams all across Lagos on a weekday: expected. We’ve been working really, really hard this year.)

And last Friday, 9th of October, we were at the Civic Centre in Victoria Island, Lagos, spending the evening among bankers, insurers, and financial institutions of all shapes and sizes. 

We went in hoping to bring home one award; we left with two.

This is our story of how it went.

Three Words: Polished, Praiseworthy and Panoramic

If you asked us to sum up the night in three words, here’s what we’d go with:

Polished, because from the parking lot, you could already tell that very important people were in the building. People walked in like they had a date with destiny, and they dressed the part!

Praiseworthy, because Cardtonic was named Digital Payments Disruptor of the Year AND Virtual Access Card Market Leader of the Year. First-time nominees come to a night like this hoping for one award, and we left with two. (And yes, we’re allowed to brag about it. We’ve earned it.)

Then panoramic, because there was a red carpet. And you already know what happens when there’s a red carpet in Nigeria, but we’ll get to that.

A Long Way From Gift Cards

Before we get into the night itself, let’s talk about how interesting it was that we were even in that room.

Cardtonic started in 2018 as a gift card trading platform. At the time, the Nigerian market wasn’t exactly on board with the gift card revolution (funny stuff). We bootstrapped, ran on grit, and convinced people that trading gift cards in an app could be safe, fast, and fair.

Over the years, that gift card business grew into virtual dollar cards and bill payments, and then into the multi-product fintech superapp our Toniks know today. We’ve built for users across Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, and more than 140 countries worldwide. This year alone, we launched our tap-to-pay Platinum Card with Apple and Google Pay integration, and we enabled stablecoin funding for our virtual dollar cards.

None of these was built for a trophy; they were built because our users needed global payments to feel less like war. But when an awards body looks at all of that and calls you a Digital Payments Disruptor, you can’t help but get a little emotional about the journey.

And now, back to Friday.

Not Our Usual Dress Code

If you read our Watch Party story, you’ll remember our dress code for that night: the coolest kicks and tank tops only. We wanted it to feel like a house party.

This was the complete opposite.

For the BAFI Awards, we pulled out the good stuff: sharp outfits, polished shoes, and everybody dressed to the nines because the night called for it. For people who work from home most of the year and spend their days in plain tees and shorts, it felt like an opportunity to play dress-up. 

And fun fact: The entire team in attendance came dressed in all-black. Nope, it was unplanned, but we looked dapper as hell in our pictures. 

What’s Better Than One Award? Two

When Cardtonic was announced as the winner of the Digital Payments Disruptor of the Year award, we were thrilled. It felt like deserving recognition for a year spent shipping products that make global payments easier for Nigerians, Ghanaians, Kenyans, South Africans and people across the world.

And then, a little later, we heard our name again for Virtual Access Card Market Leader of the Year. The team was all grins! 

Our CEO, Emmanuel Sohe (ES to us), and Lead Creative Ima received the awards on behalf of the whole company. 

Both awards are sitting somewhere in our office as a jointly owned achievement, because those beautiful, custom crystal trophies belong to every staff member on the Cardtonic team and every Tonik who has used our products and trusted us with their money.

Mama, We Made It

At some point during the night, we listened to a few people on the team talk about how it felt.

ES agreed it was a great event and that the team deserved this recognition (imposter syndrome where?). As someone who’s been here since Day 0, that was not a statement made lightly.

And during the thank-you speech on stage, Ima talked about how Cardtonic started with just gift cards, something some people didn’t know. Yet there we were, sitting in the same room as banking giants and financial institutions from across Nigeria, being celebrated alongside them. “It felt like a pat on the back,” she said.

It’s easy to forget how far you’ve come when you’re always looking ahead at what’s next. The BAFI awards night was the perfect Friday night for us to do some reflecting and to marvel at how far we’ve come. 

Strike a Pose, Red Carpet Style

After the awards, the entire team consisting of ES, Eazy, Tosin, Perfect, Ima and Tobi stepped out for pictures, and we couldn’t get enough. We took group photos, solo photos, trophy photos, and photos of people in the background taking photos.

We’ll be sharing some of them soon, so keep an eye on our social pages. You’re allowed to say we looked good, even though we know we did. 

Winding Down

By a little past nine, the event started to wrap up. The crowd slowly thinned out, trays were emptied, and the camera crew finally got a chance to breathe.

It was a long day, and by the time we walked out, we were tired in the best possible way. Thankfully, the weekend was waiting, we had two awards to show off with and a ton of photos to preserve the big day. 

What Comes Next

Rest is for those with no more ceilings to shatter; those who’ve reached the end of their ambition. 

 And if you’ve been paying attention to how we do things, you already know that’s not us.

Awards like these are lovely, but more than that, they’re a signal that the standard has been set, and now we have to keep meeting it. As we told BusinessDay, the bar can only go higher. It’s good pressure, and we intend to use it to build better products, serve more people, and make global payments feel easier for everyone who trusts us.

For Our Toniks

When we say these wins belong to you, we mean it. Every transaction, every card you funded, every bill you paid, every referral, every honest review, and every time you DM’d us with a problem we had to fix: all of that built the story that earned us a seat at that table.

So thank you, truly.

We’re giddy, we’re grateful, and we’re already thinking about how to make next year even better. 

The party was great, the awards were flattering, and the red carpet experience was stellar, but our 1.5m + users really are our biggest bragging rights, so we go again, primarily for their applause.