Paul Mutegi
Kenyan corporate lawyer and behavioural-economics enthusiast Paul Mutegi has spent the past five years turning sports-betting compliance into a growth engine. Recruited in April 2020 as Betika’s group head of legal & tax, he inherited a patchwork of pandemic-era shutdowns and fragmented statutes; today the pan-African platform trades in a dozen markets under a single playbook for KYC, VAT, and data-privacy, frameworks Mutegi’s team drafted, negotiated, and drilled through live audits. He also steered Betika’s first cross-border acquisition, closing the deal in four months while ring-fencing intellectual-property risks and securing a tax-efficient profit-repatriation path.
Mutegi’s edge is marrying black-letter law with human insight. He dissects user journeys for cognitive friction, rewrites odds disclosures in plain Swahili, and runs “nudge sprints” that have lifted responsible-gaming opt-ins by 25 percent and cut charge-back disputes in half. The GC Powerlist East Africa 2024 cites him for “making regulation a customer feature, not a cost centre,” a mantra he shares with fintech founders and junior counsel he mentors after hours. Next on his docket: guiding Betika’s push into francophone West Africa, embedding AI-driven anomaly detection across trading desks, and publishing a field guide on behavioural compliance for emerging-market tech firms, proof that smart policy can play offence as well as defence.