TenTrade’s Africa Hire Signals Where CFD Growth Is Heading

TL;DR: TenTrade has named Wilfred Obasi Regional Director for Africa, replacing Victor Ufot in a move that consolidates the broker’s commercial push on the continent. Obasi brings 13 years at Exinity, most recently as Partner Enablement Manager in Dubai. The appointment sits inside a wider 2026 leadership overhaul that includes a new CRO and CSO, both sourced from INGOT Brokers, and a global brand ambassador deal with former Portugal footballer Luis Figo.

The Appointment and What Obasi Brings

Wilfred Obasi steps into the Regional Director for Africa role at TenTrade after more than a decade at Exinity, where he built out partner networks and ran client acquisition across FX and CFD markets with a specific focus on African geographies. His most recent title there was Partner Enablement Manager, based out of Dubai — a role that sits at the intersection of IB management, product education, and revenue development.

He takes over from Victor Ufot, who had held the commercial operations seat for the region. In his new capacity, Obasi will own revenue growth, client acquisition, partnership development, and product expansion across Africa. He will also be responsible for adapting TenTrade’s CFD and prop trading offering to local market conditions — no small task given how varied regulatory environments, payment infrastructure, and retail trading adoption levels are across sub-Saharan and North African markets.

“My primary focus will naturally be on deepening relationships with our partners and brokers here,” Obasi said in the announcement. That framing — partners first, direct clients second — is consistent with how most CFD brokers scale in Africa. IB networks carry disproportionate weight in regions where digital ad costs remain high relative to average deposit sizes and where trust is often brokered person-to-person before it is built through a website.

TenTrade’s 2026 Leadership Stack Is Taking Shape

The Obasi hire is not a standalone move. TenTrade has been building out its senior commercial layer at pace this year, and the Africa appointment completes a structure that has been taking form since at least June.

Andreas Andreou joined as Chief Revenue Officer in June, arriving from INGOT Brokers where he was Chief Sales Officer. Before INGOT, Andreou held the Chief Commercial Officer role at BDSwiss and Head of Business Development at HF Markets DIFC. Marios Morfakis moved into the Chief Sales Officer post simultaneously, also coming from INGOT Brokers’ business development function.

That CRO-CSO pairing now has a regional commercial layer sitting beneath it with Obasi in Africa. The structure is orthodox for brokers operating at TenTrade’s growth stage: a central revenue function setting strategy and a regional director with the market relationships to execute it on the ground. Andreou confirmed that Obasi’s knowledge of local and regional African markets would directly inform the broker’s expansion path, which suggests Obasi is expected to feed market intelligence upward, not just execute mandates downward.

For operators thinking about their own commercial structures, this pattern is worth noting: brokers that separate market knowledge from strategic planning tend to move slower in new geographies than those that embed both at the regional level.

The Marketing Layer: Figo, Awards, and Brand-Building in Africa

Parallel to the leadership hires, TenTrade has been doing deliberate brand-building work on the continent. In April 2026, the broker signed former Portugal international Luis Figo as its global brand ambassador. The deal is tied specifically to Figo’s iconic number 10 shirt, which maps onto the TenTrade brand name directly. Football resonates across African markets at a level that very few other cultural touchpoints match, and signing a recognizable European football figure is a calculated move to build top-of-funnel awareness in markets where TenTrade does not yet have deep organic recognition.

In June, TenTrade was named Fastest Growing Broker at the Trading Awards Africa 2026, a public vote covering brokers and fintech providers operating in the African market. Public-vote awards have limited analytical weight, but they do signal community presence — a broker cannot win a public vote without an active, engaged user base casting ballots. For a broker positioning Africa as a priority market, that kind of visibility is a functional marketing asset.

The combination of a regional commercial director with genuine local networks, a culturally resonant brand ambassador, and an award that signals existing community penetration gives TenTrade a reasonably complete go-to-market stack for Africa. The question now is execution speed and whether the product localization Obasi is tasked with delivering keeps pace with the marketing investment already committed.

What This Means for Forex Operators

TenTrade’s Africa strategy offers a clear operational model for any CFD or forex broker treating emerging markets as a growth lever rather than a secondary consideration. Three things stand out.

First, IB-first market entry. Obasi’s framing around partner and broker relationships as his primary focus reflects a distribution reality in African FX markets. Retail traders in Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa are routinely introduced to brokers through IB networks, not through paid search. If your forex acquisition strategy is built entirely around digital direct response, you are leaving a significant share of addressable volume on the table in these geographies.

Second, localized product matters as much as localized marketing. Obasi’s remit includes adapting the CFD and prop trading product to the region. That means payment methods, leverage structures, local currency handling, and support language — not just translating ad copy. Operators who run a single global product configuration into African markets routinely see conversion rates 40-60% below what the same traffic produces in Western Europe, and product friction accounts for a large portion of that gap.

Third, brand ambassadors with genuine regional resonance are a different asset class than global influencer deals. Figo’s football connection to African audiences is cultural and emotional, not just reach-based. When brokers in high-CAC markets like forex and CFDs invest in brand, they need that brand to do conversion work, not just awareness work. A well-chosen ambassador shortens the trust gap with new audiences in ways that performance media cannot replicate at scale.

If you are running media into African forex audiences without a local IB network and a localized conversion stack, a full marketing audit will surface where the drop-off is happening. For operators already active in the region, the TenTrade playbook is worth benchmarking against your own structure — particularly the decision to place a domain expert with genuine local relationships at the regional commercial lead level rather than managing Africa from a head office desk.

Precision matters in emerging market expansion. The brokers that convert African retail trading interest into funded accounts consistently are the ones running audience-level targeting by country and language, not continent-wide campaigns that average out all the demographic and behavioral variation that makes individual African markets distinct from each other.

The Broader Signal for High-CAC Verticals

TenTrade’s 2026 buildout is not just a forex story. The pattern — specialist regional hire, senior commercial layer from proven competitors, culturally specific brand investment, product localization mandate — applies directly to any vertical operating in markets where trust cycles are long and IB or referral networks dominate distribution.

iGaming operators expanding into West Africa face structurally similar challenges. Sports betting penetration in Nigeria and Ghana is high, but converting awareness into registered, depositing accounts requires the same combination of local partnerships, payment localization, and brand credibility that TenTrade is investing in. Operators running iGaming acquisition programs in African markets without a regional structure in place are typically running at a significant disadvantage against local operators who already hold those relationships.

Even crypto exchanges moving into African retail markets benefit from this model. Mobile-first audiences, high cryptocurrency awareness driven by currency instability concerns in several markets, and strong peer-to-peer trading culture create a high-opportunity environment — but one that rewards operators who invest in local credibility over those who simply redirect global paid media. A structured crypto acquisition program built around regional partner networks and localized landing experiences consistently outperforms generic global campaign traffic in these markets.

For operators in any of these verticals managing lead qualification at scale across multiple African markets, AI-powered lead qualification agents can handle the initial engagement layer in local languages and time zones, reducing the load on regional teams while keeping response times competitive with local brokers who have on-the-ground staff.

TenTrade’s Africa play is one of the cleaner examples in 2026 of a CFD broker treating emerging market expansion as a structured commercial investment rather than a marketing experiment. Whether it delivers the revenue growth the leadership stack is designed to generate will be visible in their next set of public metrics.

Originally reported by Finance Magnates, July 2026.