Viola Llewellyn

Viola Llewellyn is a fintech innovator, entrepreneur, and change strategist whose career spans Fortune 100 technology companies, major financial institutions, and high-impact startups. Earlier in her career, Llewellyn led enterprise sales at IBM, Wang, Sun Microsystems, and CACI, and later held senior leadership roles at Unisys Corporation, Rothschilds, and KPMG, managing large-scale private and public sector initiatives across Europe and the United States. Her experience also includes building a $500 million life insurance investment fund for a Washington, D.C.-based insurance investment firm, where she led investor communications and asset management divisions.

Llewellyn is the co-founder and president of Ovamba Solutions, Inc. Ovamba is an African TradeTech company that creates culturally attuned technologies to serve formal and informal African small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the trade and commodities sectors. The company combines Sharia-compliant structures with e-commerce, logistics services, and technology to drive financial inclusion and promote growth. Ovamba leverages artificial intelligence and local knowledge to develop custom risk models and algorithms designed for Africa and adaptable to other markets. Under Llewellyn's leadership, the company raised $3 million in equity funding and financed more than $123 million in SME finance across multiple African countries, creating over 180 jobs, delivering consistent investor returns, and maintaining a loan default rate below 5%.

Llewellyn has spoken at major global events, including being the first female African tech founder to speak at both "Slush" Helsinki and "Slush Tokyo." She delivered a TED Talk as part of the "Reboot" series with Boston Consulting Group, titled "A New Model of Microfinance for Africa, and Beyond," where she discussed the limitations of Western risk assessment models in diverse global markets. Llewellyn is a Global Technology Pioneer and Ambassador with the World Economic Forum and has spoken at the Davos Summit. She has served as chairperson of the Africa Fintech Summit and serves on several boards, including The Africa Professional Services Group and Generosity Global, a nonprofit supporting water and sanitation projects.

Llewellyn has been recognized in the Digital Undivided Report as one of only 34 Black women in the United States to have raised more than $1 million for a technology company, as featured in Vanity Fair Magazine. She is listed on Innovate Finance's "Women in FinTech Power List" and on Latice80's "Top 100 Women in Fintech" list. Llewellyn is a published author of the Brookings Institute's "Foresight Africa" article, "Winning in Africa's FinTech: The Ovamba Way," and a contributing author to "Digital For Good: Stand For Something Or You Will Fall" by Chris Skinner, as well as contributions to the Wilson Center.

Llewellyn is the founder and CEO of PROPhaze Consulting, where she advises corporations, investors, NGOs, and founders on leadership performance, revenue growth, and market entry in fast-changing global environments, with a focus on Africa's high-growth sectors. She is recognized as an expert on African entrepreneurship, banking, fintech, diversity, and digital transformation for emerging markets, providing insight for audiences seeking to understand the future of finance and inclusive economic growth.