There's always something new to sort out, that's why I don't get bored.
By wamo ·
That's Efe Akdemir, Operational Excellence Manager at wamo, on what's kept him energized through building an entire operational structure from the ground up. In a company moving as fast as wamo, the work never fully resolves, and that's exactly what he likes about it.
Operational Excellence
Ask Efe what "operational excellence" actually means outside of a job title, and he doesn't reach for jargon. "Think of it as a middleman role," he says. At wamo, cards, onboarding, sales, customer support — every team is coordinating with every other team, and when one department's decision creates a problem for another, someone has to step in, sort out the disagreement, and keep things moving. That means building the infrastructure that lets teams actually talk to each other and constantly digging into processes to find where things break.
From the Front Line Up
Efe didn't start as a manager. He began as a customer service agent, where he learned the fundamentals everything else was built on: patience and clear communication. From there he moved quickly through supervisor, manager, and project manager, a role that took him across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa and taught him how to read a room and adjust. As he moved higher, the focus shifted to coordinating across leadership and keeping communication clear between senior teams and the people they lead.
He's matter-of-fact about how the climb happened, crediting hard work and communication above all while not totally undervaluing the importance of luck. "When all of this matches," he says, "you just go from one position to another."
Building From Scratch, in Hypergrowth
Joining wamo was a different kind of challenge than anything before it. Efe came from large corporate companies with structures already in place where they just needed adjustments. At wamo, there wasn't one to adjust yet, and that's exactly what drew him in. He likes a system he can still shape, and wamo gave him one from the very start. What keeps him from getting bored, a while further in, is that the job never fully resolves. "The existing structure is not 100% perfect," he says. "Every day there's something new to fix."
A Culture That Wants to Improve
Efe says the biggest difference at wamo, compared to previous companies, is how change is received. Elsewhere, proposing a new process usually meant resistance. At wamo, people came to him already asking for improvements, pointing out what wasn't working and pushing him to fix it. He sees that openness as one of the company's real strengths, alongside its overall ease of communication.
Three Countries, One Steep Learning Curve
Before Malta, Efe spent two years in France, and he says that was the harder move by far, mostly because he didn't speak French. Adjusting to life and work in a language he didn't know, both inside and outside the office, was genuinely difficult. Malta, by comparison, felt easy. Everyone speaks English, and within a week of arriving, he and his wife had settled in. He's candid that the second relocation was only easier because of the first: once you've done the hardest version of it, everything after feels more manageable.
AI, With a Human Still in the Loop
When Efe joined wamo, he wanted to actually understand AI properly, not just talk about it, so he enrolled in an applied AI and data science course to close a gap of his own. He describes himself as coming from the business side, without a deep technical background, and says the course helped him become comfortable writing code and building tools himself. In practice, that's meant reviewing processes, building internal apps to make operations easier, and setting up AI agents to support workflows.
But he's clear eyed about the limits. "You always need to put some human validation in," he says. AI can perform well until a task gets complex, and there's no reliable way to know in advance when it might get something wrong. There's also a consideration specific to fintech: AI works best when it can connect across platforms, but at a company handling financial data, security always comes first. He says it's about finding the right balance, and that means being deliberate about where and how AI is used.
Not Very Operational at Home
Ask his colleagues, Efe says, and they'll tell you he never forgets anything and everything is in order. At home, it's a different story. He puts himself at "80% organised" in his personal life, and happily admits that birthdays and personal to-dos don't always get the same attention as work. The operational excellence, it turns out, mostly stays at the office, and he's fine with that.
Looking Ahead
Efe has a track record of reaching new titles young, and a certain steadiness about where that trajectory leads next. At 34, he says he's never been the type to fixate on a title as an end goal. "I go after it step by step," he says. Do the job in front of him well, improve what he can, and let the next step come when it comes. He expects his scope at wamo to keep growing as the company does, and doesn't rule out where that could eventually take him.
