₦airaland Forum

Paga has always carried the imprint of one man.

For 17 years, Tayo Oviosu was not just the founder of the company — he was its voice, its rhythm, its public face. He answered customer complaints personally. He spoke for the company in interviews, boardrooms, and on social media. In many ways, Paga and Tayo became inseparable.

So when news broke that Oviosu was stepping away from the day-to-day running of Paga Nigeria, the first instinct for many was to ask what had gone wrong.

The truth is: nothing has.

If anything, this is the clearest sign yet that Paga has outgrown the shape it once had.

Oviosu is moving into the role of Group CEO, handing over operational leadership of Paga Nigeria to Opeyemi Oyinloye, the company’s General Manager of Business Operations, who will become Acting CEO pending approval from the Central Bank of Nigeria. It is the first time in nearly two decades that someone other than Oviosu will lead Paga’s largest market.

But this is not a story about a founder retreating. It is a story about a founder making room for the next version of his company.

“Act 1 of Paga ended, and Act 2 is beginning,” Oviosu said recently. It is a striking way to describe a business he has spent almost two decades building. Yet it captures something deeper: Paga is no longer just a Nigerian payments company. It wants to become something much larger — a financial infrastructure layer for Africa.

That ambition did not appear overnight.

Paga processed ₦17.1 trillion in transactions in 2025, nearly doubling its previous year’s performance. It launched banking services in the United States for Africans in the diaspora through a partnership with Regent Bank. Then, in January 2026, it became PayPal’s local partner in Nigeria, helping bring the global payments giant back into the country after twenty years away.

These are not the moves of a company settling into maturity. They are the moves of a company preparing for another leap.

Yet while Paga was expanding outward, Oviosu found himself trapped by the demands of the business he had already built. Running Nigeria’s operations — its payments systems, teams, partnerships, regulations, customer issues — left little room to focus on the future.

And the future, in Oviosu’s mind, is vast.

As Group CEO, he will now lead Paga Labs, a quiet internal division that has spent the last 18 months exploring what comes next. Stablecoins. Blockchain. Artificial intelligence. AI-powered commerce. The kind of ideas that sound abstract until you hear Oviosu describe them not as experiments, but as tools that could make payments and trade easier for millions of Africans.

He imagines a world where a Nigerian trader can pay a supplier in China through Paga. Where someone in Rwanda can use the same infrastructure seamlessly. Where Africans in the diaspora can move money home and back again without friction. Where financial borders begin to dissolve.

That is the company Oviosu wants to build now.

The decision to hand Nigeria to Oyinloye was not impulsive. Oviosu says the transition has been in motion for more than a year. Oyinloye, who has spent seven years inside the company, has quietly been the person ensuring Paga’s machine worked every day. He was not the architect of every strategy, but he made sure those strategies became reality.

In Oviosu’s words, if Paga were a sausage factory, Oyinloye was the person making sure every sausage came out right.

That may sound simple, but in a company as complex as Paga, it means he has touched almost every part of the business. Strategy. Execution. Operations. Culture. People.

Paga’s co-founder, Jay Alabraba, is also shifting into a new role, focusing on lending, credit, and supporting expansion into new markets. Together, the leadership changes reveal a company that is deliberately preparing itself for scale.

And scale will require more than vision. Paga plans to raise fresh funding and may pursue acquisitions across Africa. Though profitable, the company knows that building stablecoin products, entering new markets, and investing in AI will require capital.

Still, the most revealing part of this transition is not financial. It is emotional.

When Oviosu informed regulators about the move, he became emotional. “My child’s first word was Paga,” he said.

That one sentence explains everything.

Paga is not a company he is leaving behind. It is a company he is trying to protect from becoming too dependent on him. After 17 years, Oviosu is not stepping back. He is stepping outward — into the larger, riskier, more ambitious future he always believed Paga could reach.

And as he put it himself: there is still work to do.

Before MTN, Airtel, and Globacom became household names, Nigeria’s CDMA operators were the first to break NITEL’s monopoly and bring telephony to ordinary Nigerians. They built the market that GSM would later dominate. But weak licences, poor management, and a rapidly changing industry ensured that the pioneers would eventually disappear.

Before the ringtone became a status symbol and before Nigerians carried multiple SIM cards in their pockets, there was another era of telecoms in the country — quieter, slower, and strangely more hopeful.

It was the age of CDMA.

In the late 1990s, getting a phone line in Nigeria was almost an act of privilege. If you wanted to make a call from your home or office, you depended on NITEL. You filled out forms, joined waiting lists, and hoped the line would eventually come alive. For many Nigerians, it never did. Outside Lagos and Abuja, entire cities were cut off from reliable communication.

Then came a small group of companies that changed everything.

Multilinks, Intercellular, Starcomms, MTS, and later Visafone arrived carrying a promise that felt radical at the time: you no longer had to wait for NITEL. Suddenly, people could own telephones without begging a government monopoly for access. Small business owners, cybercafés, roadside pharmacies, and families who had never imagined having a personal line could now make calls from their homes and offices.

The irony is that these companies built the foundation of Nigeria’s telecoms market, only to lose it to the industry they helped create.

Technically, CDMA was not inferior. Many engineers still argue that it was better than early GSM. It delivered clearer calls, used spectrum more efficiently, and later offered faster internet speeds. Starcomms, perhaps the most ambitious of them all, became the first telecom company listed on the Nigerian Stock Exchange and the first in Africa to launch EV-DO broadband. By 2008, it had 2.7 million subscribers and looked unstoppable.

Visafone, founded by Jim Ovia, entered later but moved aggressively. By acquiring Cellcom, ITN, and Bourdex Telecoms, it built what became the strongest CDMA network in the country. Within months of launching in 2008, it had one million subscribers. At its peak, Visafone reached nearly three million users — more than any CDMA operator in Nigerian history.

But even in those years of growth, the seeds of failure had already been planted.

The biggest mistake was not technological. It was structural.

While MTN and Econet — later Airtel — received licences that allowed them to operate nationwide from the beginning, CDMA operators were trapped inside regional boundaries. A company licensed in Lagos could not legally expand into Kano or Port Harcourt without new approval. It meant they could only dream nationally while operating locally.

By the time the Nigerian Communications Commission corrected that mistake in 2006 and upgraded their licences, it was already too late.

MTN had built a nationwide empire. Globacom had shaken the market with per-second billing. GSM operators had become part of everyday life. They were everywhere: in cities, villages, campuses, markets. CDMA operators, meanwhile, were still fighting to expand beyond the regions they had been boxed into.

Then came the second blow: devices.

CDMA phones were locked to one network. If you bought a Starcomms phone, you stayed with Starcomms. GSM changed that entirely. With a SIM card, users could switch phones, swap networks, and move freely. Nigerians loved that flexibility. In a country where people often carry more than one line, GSM felt less like a service and more like freedom.

As GSM SIM cards became cheaper, CDMA lost its final advantage.

What followed was a slow collapse.

Multilinks, once the first private telecoms company in Nigeria, was sold for a fraction of its earlier value. Starcomms merged unsuccessfully with other struggling operators before being declared inactive. Intercellular tried to reinvent itself with 4G ambitions, but it never recovered. By 2019, the NCC reported that CDMA operators controlled 0% of Nigeria’s telecoms market.

Visafone was the last to survive. But even it could not escape the tide. In 2016, MTN acquired the company, not for its subscribers, but for its valuable 800 MHz spectrum. The network was eventually absorbed, its customers migrated, and one of the last great names of Nigeria’s CDMA era quietly disappeared.

Yet it would be too easy to say CDMA died because GSM was better.

The truth is harsher.

Many CDMA companies were underfunded and badly managed. Money meant for network expansion was reportedly diverted into unrelated businesses and political ventures. Leadership became distracted. The companies that should have been investing in infrastructure were chasing everything else.

Still, the CDMA story deserves more respect than history often gives it.
Visit technaija.com for more related articles.

These were the companies that first broke NITEL’s grip. They taught Nigerians that private telecoms could work. They connected people long before GSM became affordable. They built the first bridge across a communications desert.

Today, as Nigeria’s telecoms giants face rising costs, failing infrastructure, subscriber frustration, and fresh tariff battles, the story of CDMA feels less like ancient history and more like a warning.

Because industries do not only collapse when the technology is weak.

Sometimes, they collapse when the vision is right — but the timing, leadership, and structure are not.

Nigeria has never had a shortage of ideas. What it has often lacked is a room where those ideas can be heard before they are dismissed as too ambitious, too young, too unrealistic.

That is what made this year’s Red Bull Basement National Final matter.

On April 4, after months of applications, shortlisting, and quiet preparation, five teams stood at the centre of a national conversation that began with more than 3,000 Nigerian innovators. They came from universities, startup hubs, hostels, classrooms, and co-working spaces scattered across the country. Some had working prototypes. Some had only rough sketches and conviction. But all of them shared the same instinct: to build something that solves a problem bigger than themselves.

The final, held as part of the global Red Bull Basement programme, was not simply another startup contest. It was a mirror held up to a generation that has grown up in the middle of uncertainty and learned, somehow, to see opportunity in it.

The thousands of entries submitted this year carried the fingerprints of the Nigeria young people know intimately. There were ideas aimed at fixing broken access to education, especially for students in underserved communities. There were solutions focused on sustainable innovation, built in response to a country where electricity, waste, and environmental strain are part of daily life. Others explored health and wellness technology, creator tools, and community-driven digital platforms.

What connected them was not the technology itself. It was the urgency behind it.

Many of the students and first-time founders who applied are old enough to remember studying through blackouts, searching for jobs that never came, or watching talent leave the country because there seemed to be no room for it to grow. Their ideas were not born in laboratories. They were born in crowded lecture halls, on long bus rides, in small rooms with unreliable internet and too many dreams.

By the time the selection process ended, only five teams remained.

Each finalist was given just two minutes to pitch before a panel of respected voices from Nigeria’s technology and innovation ecosystem. Two minutes to explain a problem. Two minutes to defend a solution. Two minutes to convince the judges that their idea could move beyond a prototype and into the real world.

The judges looked for more than polished presentations. They wanted originality, scalability, social impact, and evidence that the people behind the idea understood both the challenge and the audience they hoped to serve.

That may sound like the language of startups and venture capital, but beneath it lies something much more human. The best ideas often come from people who have lived through the problem themselves.

That is the deeper power of Red Bull Basement. It does not wait for young people to become experts before giving them a platform. It assumes that lived experience is expertise. It believes that a student in a Nigerian university can have an idea worthy of global attention, even if they do not yet have investors, connections, or a perfect pitch deck.

The programme, run in partnership with Microsoft, AMD, and Red Bull Ventures, gives participants access to mentorship, AI-powered tools, and technical support. More importantly, it gives them permission to imagine bigger.

The winning team from Nigeria will move on as the country’s representative in the next stage of the global programme later this year. But even for those who did not make it beyond April 4, something important has already happened.

More than 3,000 young Nigerians chose not to wait.

They chose to build.

And in a country where innovation is too often treated as a luxury rather than a necessity, that may be the most powerful story of all.

Bread Africa was never supposed to look impressive from the outside.

There were no glossy dashboards, no elaborate onboarding flow, no long list of features dressed up as innovation. The product was almost suspiciously simple: visit the website, send your crypto, receive naira in your bank account. No account creation. No wallet connection. No KYC. No friction.

But sometimes the simplest products are built on the deepest understanding of a problem.

For years, Nigerian crypto users have lived between two worlds. One is digital, borderless, and fast. The other is local, regulated, and often painfully slow. Moving money between those worlds has never been easy. Traditional exchanges ask for too much. Bank transfers break. Wallets confuse people. The average user is left navigating a maze just to turn crypto into spendable cash.

Iam Etefia understood that frustration because he had lived inside it.

Long before Bread Africa, Etefia had already built and sold two crypto ventures — Peniwallet and Peniremit — to SMC DAO in 2023 for $250,000. He is not the kind of founder who speaks about disruption in grand, theatrical language. Instead, he builds quietly, almost obsessively, around one question: how do you make crypto feel less like technology and more like money?

That question became Bread Africa.

Founded in 2025 by Etefia, his co-founder Maven Harry, and a small community manager, the startup was designed to disappear into the background. Users could convert digital assets into local currency almost instantly. Behind the scenes, the platform worked across multiple blockchains, including Base and Solana, before settling transactions in cNGN, the naira-backed stablecoin built on Base.

That detail matters.

At a time when much of Nigeria’s crypto conversation is still trapped between speculation and regulation, Bread Africa quietly built around something more practical: a digital naira that could move globally but settle locally. Etefia saw the potential before most people did.

“We believed the naira could be spent globally, not just in Nigeria,” he said.

So Bread Africa converted crypto into cNGN and deposited it directly into users’ bank accounts. No delays. No complicated interface. Just money arriving where people needed it.

The startup processed more than $1.8 million in total payment volume before it was acquired. Not bad for a three-person team working without the noise and theatrics that often surround Web3.

Now, SMC DAO has bought the company in an undisclosed all-cash six-figure deal.

On paper, the acquisition looks straightforward. SMC DAO, a decentralised autonomous organisation made up of crypto traders and investors, wanted an exchange product inside its ecosystem. Bread Africa already had the infrastructure, the users, and the credibility. The DAO gets a functioning crypto-to-fiat platform. Bread Africa gets capital and distribution.

But the real story is what the deal says about the changing shape of Nigeria’s crypto ecosystem.

Crypto startups in Nigeria are no longer simply racing to become the next exchange. They are beginning to consolidate, merge, and specialise. Earlier this year, Roqqu acquired Flitaa, another regional exchange platform. Now Bread Africa joins a growing list of smaller startups being absorbed into larger ecosystems.

It is the kind of consolidation that usually happens when a market begins to mature.

SMC DAO plans to keep Bread Africa’s core identity intact: no sign-ups, no wallet connections, no KYC. But it wants to take the product further. In the future, Bread Africa may become a “swap everything” platform — a place where users can move between crypto, fiat currencies, tokenised stocks, commodities, and other digital assets as easily as switching tabs in a browser.

The ambition is to make Bread Africa function less like an exchange and more like a financial gateway.

Etefia, meanwhile, is moving on.

He will remain as an adviser, but his attention is now fixed on Loaf, the next company he is building with Harry. If Bread Africa was about cashing out of crypto, Loaf is about living inside it. The product aims to become a kind of Web3 bank, where users can pay bills, buy airtime, send money across borders, and spend digital assets without ever touching a traditional exchange.

It is a familiar pattern in African tech: founders build one focused product, sell it, then use the lessons to chase a larger vision.

For Etefia, Bread Africa was never the destination. It was the bridge.

Kenyans are used to moving money with astonishing speed. A market trader in Kisumu can receive payment in seconds. A university student in Nairobi can split rent through a mobile wallet before class begins. A boda rider in Mombasa can pay for fuel without ever touching cash. For years, Kenya has been celebrated as one of Africa’s most sophisticated digital payments markets.

Yet beneath that speed lies a messy truth: the country’s payment systems remain fragmented.

Banks operate on one set of rails. Telecom operators run another. Mobile wallets, merchants, ATMs, and fintechs often speak different technological languages. Money moves, yes — but not always easily, cheaply, or seamlessly. Every transfer between systems is a negotiation. Every transaction carries invisible friction.

That is why the battle now unfolding in Kenya matters.

Kenswitch, one of the country’s oldest payments infrastructure companies, has struck a partnership with Visa as the race to control Kenya’s future national switch intensifies. On the surface, it is a framework agreement between a local switch operator and a global payments giant. But beneath it lies something much larger: a struggle over who will own the invisible rails that power the Kenyan economy.

For John Mukono, the CEO of Kenswitch, this moment is years in the making. Kenswitch was founded in 2002, long before fintech became fashionable, as part of Kenya’s attempt to modernise its payments landscape. Quietly, it built a network connecting more than 30 financial institutions, thousands of ATMs, point-of-sale terminals, and agent banking outlets across the country.

Mukono has spent years watching the ecosystem evolve. He has seen mobile money dominate, banks adapt, and fintech startups race into spaces once reserved for traditional institutions. But he also knows that no matter how many apps or wallets exist, the real power lies deeper — in the system that clears and settles the transactions underneath.

That is where Visa enters the story.

Through the new partnership, Kenswitch will combine its domestic infrastructure with Visa’s global technology, fraud prevention systems, data analytics, and digital payment tools. The two companies plan to build products for banks, fintechs, merchants, and SACCOs while strengthening the processing and settlement systems that move money across Kenya.

To some, that may sound technical. But in reality, it is about trust.

Every payment system rests on an unspoken promise: that money will arrive where it is meant to go, safely and instantly. As Kenya designs a real-time national switch and fast payment system, that promise is becoming increasingly valuable. The Central Bank of Kenya wants a network that allows customers to send money seamlessly between banks and mobile wallets, regardless of provider. It wants lower costs, more interoperability, and greater control over the country’s financial arteries.

And where there is control, there is competition.

Banks are pushing Pesalink, operated by the Kenya Bankers Association through Integrated Payment Services Limited, to become the backbone of the new network. Telecom operators want their own influence preserved. Foreign infrastructure players are circling too. Earlier this year, Nigeria’s national switch, NIBSS, teamed up with local firm Ceva to position itself for a role in Kenya’s payments future.

Now Kenswitch is making its own move.

By aligning with Visa, it is betting that Kenya’s next payments era will not be won by local infrastructure alone, nor by foreign technology in isolation, but by a marriage of both. Kenswitch brings the domestic reach, the regulatory familiarity, and the existing network. Visa brings global experience, advanced fraud tools, and the scale of a company that processes trillions of dollars in transactions around the world.

The Central Bank of Kenya has made one thing clear: the country’s future payments system must remain interoperable and locally grounded. Kenya does not want to surrender control of its financial infrastructure, even as it welcomes international expertise.

That delicate balance may define the next chapter of the race.
Visit technaija.com for more related articles.

Kenswitch’s partnership with Visa is not merely a business deal. It is a signal. A declaration that the contest for Kenya’s payments rails is entering a new phase — one where infrastructure, trust, and national strategy matter as much as technology itself.

Because in the end, whoever controls the switch will not just control transactions. They will help shape how Kenya moves, spends, saves, and grows.

Ghana has transformed its national ID card into a payment tool. By adding a digital wallet to the Ghana Card, the country is attempting something far larger than convenience: it is merging identity and finance into a single system that could redefine how Africans access money, services, and even trade.

There was a time when a national identity card was little more than proof that you existed.

You kept it in a drawer, brought it out when a government office demanded it, and slipped it back into your wallet once the moment passed. In much of Africa, an ID card has long been a symbol of bureaucracy: necessary, powerful, but distant from everyday life.

Ghana wants to change that.

The country’s National Identification Authority has now activated a digital wallet on the Ghana Card, allowing the same card once used for SIM registration and passport applications to make payments in shops, online, and at ATMs. Current cardholders can activate the wallet through the MyCitizens App or by dialling *402#.

At first glance, it sounds like a simple technological upgrade. Another country, another digital payment feature. But beneath that headline lies something more radical: Ghana is trying to turn identity itself into financial infrastructure.

The idea has been years in the making.

When the Ghana Card was first conceived, the National Identification Authority did not imagine it as just an identification document. The vision was always larger. The card would serve three purposes at once: identity, passport, and payments.

The first layer came through the digital identity system. The second arrived in 2022, when the e-passport feature allowed the Ghana Card to be accepted as a travel document in 197 countries. Now comes the third and perhaps most ambitious stage: the e-wallet.

This matters because Ghana, like much of Africa, still struggles with financial inclusion. Traditional banking systems have often failed to reach large parts of the population. Credit cards remain rare. In 2024, Ghana’s credit card penetration rate stood at just 0.6%, and forecasts suggest that number could continue to fall over the next several years.

For millions of people, access to financial tools has always depended on whether they had a bank account, a branch nearby, or the paperwork needed to qualify. Ghana’s new wallet changes that equation. If you already possess a Ghana Card, you already possess the foundation of a financial identity.

The card can now be used for ATM withdrawals, in-store purchases, online payments, and even international transactions across more than 200 countries. It also comes with access to additional services such as insurance and emergency assistance.

But perhaps the most striking part of the system is what it is not.

The embedded wallet is not controlled by one bank. It is not tied to a single financial institution. Instead, the National Identification Authority says it has been designed as a common platform that banks can integrate into. In other words, the Ghana Card could become a financial layer sitting above the banking sector itself — one card, one identity, many institutions.

That is a powerful idea.

For decades, the architecture of digital payments has largely belonged to banks, telecom companies, and global card networks like Visa and Mastercard. Ghana appears to be experimenting with a different model: one where identity becomes the gateway to payments, reducing dependence on external card infrastructure and making the state-issued ID the centre of economic life.

The implications stretch far beyond buying groceries or paying bills.

When the wallet was first announced in 2025, the National Identification Authority also revealed plans to explore a partnership with the Ghana Gold Board. The idea was unusual but revealing: use the Ghana Card as a platform for gold trading and tokenised transactions. In a country where gold is one of the economy’s most important resources, the card could eventually become more than a payment method. It could become a passport into entirely new forms of commerce.

Whether that vision materialises remains uncertain. For now, the payments feature has launched, but there has been no confirmation that the gold integration is active.

Still, the direction is clear.

Ghana is no longer treating identity as something static. It is treating it as a living system — one that can unlock banking, travel, trade, and economic participation all at once.

If the Ghana Card succeeds, other African countries will be watching closely. Because what Ghana is building is not just a smarter ID card. It is an argument that in the future, who you are may matter more than which bank you use.

And in that future, a small plastic card in your pocket could quietly become the most important financial tool you own.

Lasbery Oludimu did not stumble into digital assets because of hype. She arrived there slowly, cautiously, almost reluctantly.

Long before she became one of the most important women helping shape Yellow Card’s operations across Africa, she was a lawyer in Nigeria trying to build the kind of career people considered respectable. She began in private practice, learning the discipline of the courtroom and the weight of paperwork, then rose through the ranks until she became head of chambers. For many lawyers, that would have been enough. A destination. A title. A life.

But Oludimu was already looking beyond the courtroom.

She understood early that law, by itself, was not enough. The world inside companies required a different language — finance, governance, strategy, people. So she began preparing for a future she could not yet fully see. She earned qualifications from the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators and later the Institute of Chartered Secretaries and Administrators of Nigeria, where she learned bookkeeping, corporate governance, board procedures, and human resources.

Most trial lawyers stop at litigation. Oludimu wanted to understand how businesses actually worked.

That desire led her into oil and gas. In 2018, Broron, an oil and gas services company, hired her as head of legal. It looked like the logical next step: stable, prestigious, familiar. She managed legal affairs, corporate transactions, and commercial negotiations. The path ahead seemed clear.

Then, quietly, another path opened.

That same year, while still in private practice, she was given a file to handle. A company called Yellow Card wanted to register in Nigeria. At the time, Yellow Card was little more than an emerging startup with an unusual idea about cryptocurrency and stablecoins. Oludimu handled the registration like any other assignment, helping incorporate Yellow Card Nigeria with the Corporate Affairs Commission.

There was no revelation. No dramatic moment.

To her, it was just another client.

But sometimes the things that change our lives begin as routine.

The turning point came later, in a conversation with Yellow Card’s founder and CEO, Chris Maurice. He spoke not only about what Yellow Card was building, but about what Africa could become in the next decade. He talked about financial systems that moved faster, borders that mattered less, and digital assets that could solve real problems in countries where traditional banking often failed.

For Oludimu, the conversation did not feel like listening to a salesman. It felt like looking through a window into the future.

She began consulting for Yellow Card. Then in 2021, she made a decision that surprised even her: she left oil and gas and joined the company full-time as in-house counsel.

The move looked risky from the outside. Oil and gas was proven. Crypto was controversial, unpredictable, and still poorly understood in much of Africa. But Oludimu was never chasing comfort. She was chasing meaning.

At Yellow Card, she became far more than a lawyer. As the company expanded into more than 20 African countries, she led registrations, handled regulatory filings, and drafted the legal frameworks for new products. While working on Yellow Pay, Yellow Card’s payment gateway, she discovered that writing terms and conditions was impossible unless she truly understood how the product functioned.

Curiosity pulled her deeper.

Soon, she was sitting in operations meetings, understanding customer flows, solving product problems, and helping shape how the company actually worked. By 2024, the transition was complete: she became Vice President of Operations, overseeing product and regulatory operations across multiple African markets.

Yet beneath the promotions and titles is a quieter story — one that began long before boardrooms and fintech.

As a teenager in boarding school, her allowance was controlled by a housemaster. Every week, she had to explain how she spent the last one before she could receive more. She learned discipline. Accountability. The uncomfortable truth that money is not just something to spend, but something to steward.

She still carries that lesson.

She remembers once accidentally receiving more money than she needed for school fees. Instead of keeping it, she brought the remainder home. It is a small story, but perhaps it explains everything about her: the refusal to take shortcuts, the instinct to be responsible, the belief that success is earned, not rushed.

In an era obsessed with quick wins and overnight wealth, Lasbery Oludimu represents something different. She is not selling the fantasy of digital assets. She is building the structure beneath it — the regulation, discipline, and operational backbone that Africa’s financial future will require.

And maybe that is why her journey matters.

Because she did not abandon oil and gas for digital assets. She left one version of certainty for another kind of possibility.

For ten years, Flutterwave stood in the middle of Africa’s digital economy without ever truly owning it.

Every time a customer paid for a ride on Uber, subscribed to Netflix, bought software from Microsoft, or sent money home through Send App, there was a good chance Flutterwave was somewhere in the background — invisible, efficient, moving billions across borders and between banks.

But the irony was always there.

Flutterwave helped move the money, yet it could not keep it.

More than $40 billion has passed through its rails since the company was founded in 2016. Forty billion dollars. And not a single cent stayed on the platform. The accounts belonged to partner banks. The virtual cards came from partner banks. The settlement infrastructure belonged to partner banks. Flutterwave was the engine, but someone else owned the road.

Now, that has changed.

Flutterwave has secured a national microfinance banking licence in Nigeria, giving it the power to hold customer deposits and issue loans directly in its biggest market. The licence came through its acquisition of open banking startup Mono in January, and it may prove to be the most important decision the company has made since its founding.

Because this is no longer just about payments.

It is about ownership.

For Olugbenga Agboola, Flutterwave’s co-founder and CEO, the licence is the line between being a company that enables transactions and a company that becomes the place where those transactions live.

For years, Flutterwave’s business model was built on volume. Move more money. Process more merchants. Expand into more countries. It worked. The company built one of Africa’s largest fintech networks, operating in more than 35 countries and securing over 50 licences globally. Yet payments, by themselves, are a low-margin business. The money comes and goes. The relationship with the customer remains shallow.

Banking changes that.

With the new licence, Flutterwave can now create its own account numbers, issue its own payment cards, settle transactions on its own infrastructure, and eventually lend directly to businesses and consumers. The merchants that once used Flutterwave only to collect payments can now keep money with Flutterwave, pay suppliers through Flutterwave, borrow from Flutterwave, and perhaps one day run their entire treasury operations there.

The transition feels almost inevitable when you look closely at Agboola’s journey.

From the beginning, he never built Flutterwave to be just another payment gateway. He built it around a frustration that every African entrepreneur knows too well: the continent’s financial systems do not speak to one another. Moving money between countries is difficult. Opening business accounts is slow. Accessing credit is harder still.

Flutterwave solved one piece of that puzzle. Now it wants to solve the rest.

The company has already begun preparing for that future. A separate leadership team and board are being constituted for the new bank, with governance at the centre of the strategy. Mono’s infrastructure — particularly its ability to connect to customers’ bank accounts and recover funds linked to their Bank Verification Number — gives Flutterwave a powerful edge in lending.

That matters because lending in Nigeria is not simply about giving out money. It is about reducing risk. Non-performing loans have long haunted lenders across the country. But by combining transaction histories from millions of merchants with Mono’s open banking data, Flutterwave believes it can build a smarter, more precise way to decide who gets credit and how that money is recovered.

The company plans to relaunch Flutterwave Capital, its business lending product, and to issue cards to its two million Send App users and four million business customers. Send App itself will evolve from a remittance tool into a full consumer banking product. Flutterwave for Business will become something bigger too — not merely a merchant platform, but the foundation of a digital bank for African businesses.

There is another layer to this story, one that says as much about Nigeria as it does about Flutterwave.

For years, Africa’s biggest fintech companies operated in the shadows of traditional banks. They relied on them, partnered with them, sometimes even feared them. But recently, the balance has begun to shift. Companies like Paystack, OPay, Moniepoint, and PalmPay have all moved deeper into banking. The era of fintechs borrowing legitimacy from banks is fading. They are becoming banks themselves.

Flutterwave’s move may be the boldest of them all.

Not because of what it can do today, but because of what Agboola believes it can become.

He has said that in ten years, Flutterwave could become “the JP Morgan of Africa” — or be acquired by one. It is an ambitious statement, perhaps even audacious. But then again, so was the idea that a Nigerian startup could one day process $40 billion in payments across Africa.

Now, Flutterwave wants to do more than move money.

It wants to become the place for African banks.

For years, Nigeria’s banks sold the future as something smooth and effortless.

Open an account in minutes. Transfer money instantly. Pay with your phone. Borrow without entering a branch. Somewhere between the rise of fintechs, agent banking, QR codes, and instant payments, the old image of banking — long queues, paper slips, tired cashiers — began to disappear.

But every digital revolution leaves a shadow behind.

In Nigeria, that shadow has become increasingly expensive.

The Central Bank of Nigeria has now given deposit money banks 21 days to complete a new Cybersecurity Self-Assessment Tool, known as CSAT, while other financial institutions — including fintechs, payment service providers, microfinance banks, and finance companies — have five weeks to comply. The message from the regulator is simple: before the next attack comes, find out how vulnerable you really are.

At first glance, the directive looks like another compliance exercise — another form, another deadline, another circular signed and filed away. But this one feels different. It arrives at a moment when Nigeria’s financial system is growing faster than its ability to protect itself.

Last year alone, Nigeria’s banking and financial sector suffered an average of 4,718 cyberattacks every week. Fraud losses surged by more than 600% in the first quarter of 2025, rising to ₦3.29 billion across more than 12,000 reported cases. At the same time, instant payments exploded to ₦284.99 trillion in the first three months of 2025. More money is moving through mobile apps, banking portals, agency networks, and APIs than ever before. More money, inevitably, means more targets.

The people inside the system know this already.

Somewhere in a Lagos bank office, a security analyst watches suspicious login attempts flicker across a screen at 2 a.m. In another office, a compliance officer studies transaction logs, looking for the tiny irregularity that could signal something much larger. Across Nigeria’s financial sector, there are people whose work is invisible until something goes wrong.

The CBN’s new self-assessment tool is designed to force institutions to confront those invisible weaknesses before attackers do. It goes far beyond asking whether a bank has antivirus software or a cybersecurity team. The CSAT digs into who is accountable when systems fail, whether boards and executives take cyber risk seriously, how prepared institutions are for a ransomware attack, and whether third-party vendors have become silent vulnerabilities.

It also examines the things banks often prefer not to discuss publicly: outdated systems, weak internal controls, overworked security teams, and the uncomfortable possibility that the next breach may not come from outside, but from within.

The submissions must include supporting documents and reflect the institution’s cybersecurity position as of December 31, 2025. The CBN has warned that any false, incomplete, or misleading information will attract sanctions. This is not a box-ticking exercise. The regulator plans to validate the submissions through reviews and supervisory engagements.

What makes this directive especially important is that it reflects a broader change in how the CBN sees risk.

For decades, regulators reacted after the damage was done. A bank was hacked, customers lost money, a circular followed. But the new approach is more preventive. The CBN is trying to move from reacting to crises to predicting them.

That shift matters because Nigerian banking is no longer only about vaults and branches. The real vaults now live in databases, cloud servers, payment gateways, and millions of smartphones. A single breach can travel faster than a robbery ever could. It can drain accounts, cripple systems, destroy trust, and spread panic in minutes.

Trust, after all, is the true currency of banking.

People do not leave their money with banks because of buildings or logos. They do it because they believe the system will protect them. The danger for Nigeria’s financial sector is that digital growth has moved faster than digital trust.

The CBN’s 21-day deadline is, in many ways, an admission of that reality. It is the regulator saying that the next phase of banking will not be defined by who moves money fastest, but by who can keep it safest.

And in a country where every swipe, transfer, and notification now carries the weight of an economy in motion, that may be the most important test of all.

For years, Nigeria’s relationship with cryptocurrency felt like a family argument that never ended.

Young Nigerians embraced it with urgency. They used it to protect their savings from inflation, move money across borders, pay freelancers, receive salaries, and build entire businesses outside the limits of traditional banking. Regulators, on the other hand, watched with suspicion. To them, crypto was not only innovation; it was opacity, risk, and a door through which money could disappear without explanation.

Now, the conversation is changing.

The Central Bank of Nigeria has begun an Anti-Money Laundering, Counter-Financing of Terrorism, and Counter-Proliferation Financing supervision pilot focused on virtual asset activity. It is the clearest sign yet that the country is moving from broad caution to active oversight. Rather than standing outside the crypto market and warning people away, the regulator is stepping inside the room.

The pilot will involve some of the most visible names in Nigeria’s financial technology ecosystem: Paystack, Flutterwave, cNGN, Juicyway, KoinKoin, and KuCoin. These firms will submit monthly compliance reports, meet directly with supervisors, and undergo detailed reviews of how they handle customer onboarding, sanctions screening, transaction monitoring, and cross-border transfers.

The choice of companies is revealing.

Paystack and Flutterwave are not crypto exchanges in the traditional sense. They are symbols of Nigeria’s fintech rise — companies that built trust by simplifying payments for businesses and consumers. Their inclusion suggests that the lines between fintech and virtual assets are becoming harder to separate. The future of money in Nigeria may not belong to crypto companies alone; it may belong to the firms that can sit between traditional banking and digital assets, translating one world into the other.

That shift has been coming for a while.

Nigeria is one of the busiest virtual asset markets on earth. According to Chainalysis, Nigerians transacted $92.1 billion in cryptocurrency between July 2024 and June 2025 — nearly three times more than any other African country. The scale is extraordinary. What once looked like a fringe activity has become part of everyday economic life.

But growth without structure creates anxiety. Regulators worry about money laundering, terrorist financing, sanctions evasion, and illicit flows hidden behind anonymous wallets. Businesses worry about unclear rules. Investors worry about unpredictability.

This pilot is an attempt to answer all three fears at once.

The CBN insists that the programme does not replace the existing legal framework or override the authority of other agencies. That matters because Nigeria’s digital asset system is becoming more layered. The 2025 Investment and Securities Act formally recognised the Securities and Exchange Commission as the country’s main digital assets regulator, while the government has since moved toward a coordinated model involving the newly created Virtual Asset Regulatory Council and Virtual Asset Regulatory Office.

Under that structure, the CBN’s role is narrower but no less powerful. It wants to understand how virtual asset businesses operate, where the risks lie, and whether these companies can meet global standards before the market becomes even larger.

At the centre of those standards is the so-called Travel Rule, developed by the Financial Action Task Force. It requires firms to share information about the sender and receiver of a transaction whenever money moves between platforms. For crypto companies built on speed and privacy, that is a profound change. Yet it is also the price of legitimacy.

The urgency is not accidental. In October 2025, Nigeria was removed from the FATF grey list after nearly three years of scrutiny. One of the conditions for leaving that list was stronger anti-money laundering enforcement and greater transparency across the financial system. This pilot is part of that unfinished work.

The involvement of the Nigeria Financial Intelligence Unit adds another layer of seriousness. This is no symbolic exercise. Companies that join the pilot are being tested not only on whether they can grow, but on whether they can survive under the same discipline expected of banks.

Still, there is something almost poetic about this moment.

For years, Nigeria treated crypto like a storm outside the window — loud, disruptive, impossible to ignore. Now, instead of pretending the storm will pass, the country is building stronger walls, better maps, and perhaps, eventually, a door.

Because the question is no longer whether Nigerians will use digital assets.

They already do.

The real question is who will be trusted to govern the future that has already arrived.

Kechi Adolphus does not speak like a founder chasing headlines. He speaks like a man who has spent too much time inside broken systems to still believe in shortcuts.

Long before Fixr Technologies became one of Nigeria’s most quietly ambitious engineering companies, Adolphus had already made up his mind about one thing: technology alone was never going to save African service businesses.

The bigger problem was trust.

In Nigeria, almost everyone has a story about a technician who never returned, an electrician who disappeared halfway through a job, or an air-conditioner repair that somehow created more damage than it solved. The informal service economy survives on recommendations, luck, and desperation. Most people keep one trusted repairman’s number because the alternative is gambling.

Adolphus saw that disorder and realised that what Nigeria lacked was not another app. It lacked a company willing to take responsibility.

That belief became Fixr.

Today, the Lagos-based company has crossed more than ₦3 billion in revenue without raising a single naira from investors. Its renewable energy financing arm alone has processed nearly ₦5 billion in gross merchandise value. It operates across several Nigerian regions, has expanded into Ghana and Nairobi, employs roughly 400 technicians, runs dark stores for spare parts, manages its own logistics, and is projecting even more aggressive growth in 2026.

Yet Adolphus insists that people still misunderstand what the company is.

Fixr is not a marketplace.

That distinction matters because Nigeria has already seen the marketplace story. A startup builds an app, recruits technicians, connects them to customers, takes a percentage, and waits for scale. On paper, it sounds efficient. In practice, it collapses.

The moment a technician does a good job, the customer saves the number and never returns to the platform. If the technician does a bad job, the customer leaves anyway. Either way, the company disappears from the relationship.

Adolphus learned that lesson the hard way.

Instead of continuing down that path, he and co-founder Olamide Akangbe rebuilt Fixr around a different idea: act like a contractor, not an intermediary.

So when a customer books a service through Fixr, they are not hiring a random technician. They are hiring Fixr itself.

The company assigns the worker, supplies the parts, handles the communication, monitors the job, manages payment, and remains responsible after the work is done. The technician is only one piece of the system.

It is a more difficult model to build because it requires control. Control requires staff. Staff require salaries. Salaries require discipline.

That is why most startups avoid it.

But Adolphus believes ownership is the only way to build a durable service business in Africa. Most of Fixr’s technicians are full-time salaried employees. The company trains them, tracks their performance, and can send them back if a customer is unhappy. The rate of technicians bypassing the company to work directly with customers is almost nonexistent.

That level of control has allowed Fixr to move beyond basic repairs into seven carefully chosen categories: HVAC, renewable energy, electrical systems, electronics, CCTV, fibre optics, and home automation.

These are not random services. They are the backbone of a country trying to modernise while living with failing infrastructure.

The most important category may be solar.

Adolphus understands that Nigeria’s energy crisis is no longer just an inconvenience; it is a market. Millions of households and businesses need stable power, but very few can afford the upfront cost of a solar installation.

So Fixr created a financing model.

Working with institutions such as Sterling Bank and Checkoff Finance, the company allows customers to install solar systems immediately and pay over time. Fixr handles the installation, monitors the system throughout the repayment period, and remains responsible for maintenance.

It is a small but powerful shift. The company is no longer simply selling repairs; it is creating access.

That financing arm has already generated close to ₦5 billion in transaction value, revealing just how large the opportunity is when a company understands both the pain point and the customer.

What makes the story more compelling is that Fixr was never built like a conventional startup.

Adolphus did not begin with venture capital, pitch decks, or the language of disruption. He began with a repair shop.

Akangbe, his co-founder, owned an electrical repair business before they met. Their first interaction was simple: Akangbe came to fix Adolphus’ washing machine and asked for help building a website.

Adolphus looked past the website.

He saw a fragmented industry filled with wasted value.

Technology, in his view, was not the product. It was the layer that would eventually allow the business to scale.

That philosophy now runs through Fixr’s operations. The company has built internal software to manage assignments, inventory, customer follow-ups, and maintenance schedules. It has a technician-facing app that tracks field operations and performance. It has a customer platform that allows users to request services, manage annual maintenance contracts, view reports, and follow their solar financing.

But even now, Adolphus refuses to describe Fixr as a software company.

He sees it as something more practical and, perhaps, more valuable: an infrastructure company for trust.

That may be why the business has survived without outside funding.

While many African startups spent the last decade racing after investor money, Fixr grew on revenue, debt, and restraint. The company reinvested profits, used credit facilities from its banking partners, and expanded only when the numbers made sense.

The approach is slower. It is less glamorous. It does not produce flashy funding announcements or billion-dollar valuations.

But it produces something that is becoming increasingly rare in African tech: a company that actually works.

In an ecosystem where many founders are still trying to convince investors of what they might become, Kechi Adolphus is building something else entirely.

He is building proof.
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Africa Bitcoin Corporation has just crossed an almost symbolic threshold.

The South Africa-based company now holds 5.0246 Bitcoin in its corporate treasury. On paper, it is a modest figure — barely enough to command attention in a global crypto industry where some firms speak in thousands of coins. Yet for Africa Bitcoin Corporation, the moment is less about what it owns today and more about what it is trying to become.

By 2030, the company says it wants to hold 21,000 BTC.

That target is staggering. It would make Africa Bitcoin Corporation the largest African-listed company with Bitcoin on its balance sheet, placing it in a rare category of firms treating Bitcoin not simply as a speculative trade, but as a treasury reserve strategy. At its current pace, however, the company has only reached 0.02% of that ambition.

The gap between five Bitcoin and twenty-one thousand tells you almost everything about the company: it is still in its opening chapter, but it is thinking several chapters ahead.

Africa Bitcoin Corporation, often referred to simply as ABC, is not a conventional crypto startup. It is part SME lender, part advisory business, part public-market vehicle. Listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, the company has positioned itself as one of the very few regulated firms in Africa offering indirect exposure to Bitcoin through a publicly traded stock.

That distinction matters.

Across Africa, interest in Bitcoin has always been driven by something deeper than hype. In countries where inflation erodes savings, currencies weaken, and access to global financial systems remains uneven, Bitcoin has often been seen less as a gamble and more as an escape route. But buying and holding Bitcoin directly is still out of reach for many institutional investors. Pension funds, family offices, and more conservative investors often cannot hold crypto outright because of regulatory or compliance restrictions.

Africa Bitcoin Corporation is betting that those investors still want exposure — just in a form they can trust.

By buying shares in the company, investors gain indirect access to a growing Bitcoin treasury without needing a crypto wallet, private keys, or offshore trading accounts. In effect, ABC is trying to become Africa’s version of a listed Bitcoin proxy.

The company has accumulated its 5.0246 BTC through seven transactions since 2024, paying a weighted average of $100,574 per coin. That timing reveals something important about its philosophy. ABC is not trying to time the market in the short term. It is accumulating deliberately, steadily, and publicly.

Its cumulative Bitcoin yield has now reached 207%, fuelled largely by a burst of buying in the final months of 2025. The company’s Bitcoin net asset value currently stands at $359,140, a small but growing reserve that sits at the centre of its future.

Still, the numbers expose the tension in ABC’s strategy.

Its market-to-net asset value multiple stands at 46.29x, meaning the company’s total enterprise value is far larger than the value of the Bitcoin it currently holds. In other words, investors are not just buying the Bitcoin on its balance sheet. They are buying the story — the possibility that this company could one day become the continent’s most prominent Bitcoin treasury business.

That is a risky proposition. Bitcoin remains volatile. Regulation remains uncertain. And 21,000 BTC is not merely an ambitious goal; it is an almost audacious one.

But perhaps that is precisely the point.

Africa Bitcoin Corporation is operating in a region where financial imagination has often had to move faster than infrastructure. It is listed not only in South Africa, but also on Namibia’s stock exchange, the OTCQB Venture Market in the United States, and Germany’s Börse Frankfurt. The company is widening its investor base across continents, hoping to attract those who want exposure to Bitcoin through familiar, regulated markets.

Behind the spreadsheets and dashboards is a larger idea: that African investors should not always have to stand at the edge of global financial trends, watching from a distance. They should be able to participate, own, and build wealth through them.

For now, Africa Bitcoin Corporation holds just over five Bitcoin. But sometimes, the most important thing about a beginning is not how small it is — it is how clearly it reveals the size of the ambition behind it.

For millions of Africans, saving money is often an act of quiet risk.

A shop owner in Lagos wakes up to find the value of her earnings reduced by inflation. A freelancer in Nairobi waits days for an international payment to arrive, only to lose part of it to fees and currency conversion. A young entrepreneur in Cairo saves diligently, but watches the local currency weaken faster than his ambitions can grow.

This is the silent crisis that shaped Hamilton Labs.

When Mo Kasstawi co-founded the Egyptian financial infrastructure company, he was not trying to build another cryptocurrency startup. He was responding to a reality that people across Africa know too well: access to stable dollars is still treated like a privilege rather than a financial necessity.

Now Hamilton Labs has secured fresh backing from AXIAN Investment, the venture arm of the pan-African AXIAN Group, to scale its stablecoin infrastructure across the continent. The amount remains undisclosed, but the signal is unmistakable. One of Africa’s largest investment groups is betting that dollar-backed digital assets could become a central pillar of the continent’s financial future.

At the centre of Hamilton’s strategy is USDh, a dollar-pegged stablecoin backed by US government bonds. On paper, that sounds technical. In practice, it means something far simpler: users can hold a digital dollar that not only preserves value, but also earns a return.

That distinction matters.

Traditional stablecoins like USDT and USDC have become popular because they give people a way to hold dollars digitally. But Hamilton believes that is no longer enough. The company wants to turn the digital dollar into a living financial product — one that allows people not just to protect their savings, but to grow them.

USDh does this by embedding the returns generated from the government bonds backing the token directly into the asset itself. A user in Accra, Kigali, or Johannesburg can hold USDh and quietly earn yield, even if they do not have access to a bank account, a dollar account, or an international investment platform.

But Mo Kasstawi knows that technology alone rarely changes anything. Infrastructure does.

That is why Hamilton is not merely launching a stablecoin. It is building the rails beneath it. Through a single API, Hamilton allows fintech companies, digital wallets, exchanges, and over-the-counter desks to plug USDh directly into their products. A startup can offer dollar wallets, cross-border payments, or yield-bearing savings accounts without spending years building that infrastructure from scratch.

The company has not yet revealed its partners, but its strategy is clear: go where demand already exists. Across Africa, people are already using informal methods to store value in dollars — cash under mattresses, foreign bank accounts, peer-to-peer crypto transfers. Hamilton wants to formalise that demand and place it inside trusted, compliant financial products.

That compliance piece is especially important.

Africa’s relationship with crypto has often been marked by suspicion, regulatory uncertainty, and the collapse of overhyped projects. Hamilton is trying to distance itself from that chaos. Its pitch is not about speculation. It is about utility. It is about building something fintechs can actually use at scale.

For AXIAN, this is already its second investment in stablecoin infrastructure. The company sees stablecoins not as a fringe technology, but as a natural extension of mobile money — the next layer in the evolution of African finance.

That logic is hard to ignore. Mobile money changed the continent by allowing people to move local currency digitally. Stablecoins could do the same for dollars.

And perhaps that is the deeper story behind Hamilton Labs. It is not simply creating another digital token. It is attempting to answer a much older question: what happens when people who have spent years locked out of stable financial systems are finally given access to one?

Hamilton believes the answer begins in Africa, but does not end there. The company is already looking beyond the continent toward the Middle East, Latin America, and Southeast Asia — regions where inflation, unstable currencies, and weak banking systems have created the same hunger for reliable dollars.

For Mo Kasstawi, Africa is only the first chapter.
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The real ambition is larger: a global dollar network built not for the wealthy, but for the millions of people who have spent too long waiting for the financial system to work in their favour.

Moniepoint has always understood something many African fintechs learn too late: payments are only the beginning.

For years, the Nigerian unicorn built its reputation in the crowded, chaotic world of merchant banking. It became the quiet infrastructure behind thousands of kiosks, pharmacies, restaurants, and neighbourhood shops. In places where cash still moved faster than trust, Moniepoint offered both. It gave small businesses terminals, accounts, transfers, and eventually credit. Then it gave them something even more valuable — speed.

By 2025, Moniepoint was processing more than $294 billion in annualised transaction value. But scale, on its own, was never the end of the story. The deeper ambition was always larger, more patient, and more dangerous: to own the entire financial relationship with the merchant.

That ambition has now crossed a border.

Moniepoint has completed the acquisition of a 78% stake in Kenya’s Sumac Microfinance Bank, finally giving the Nigerian fintech the foothold it has long sought in East Africa’s largest economy. The deal, finalised in Nairobi’s Westlands district, ends years of searching, waiting, and failed attempts to enter the Kenyan market.

Its earlier effort through payments company Kopo Kopo never quite materialised. Kenya’s regulatory environment is famously difficult terrain. The Central Bank of Kenya has frozen the issuance of new banking licences for years, making it nearly impossible for new players to enter from scratch. For Moniepoint, there were only two options: wait indefinitely, or buy a door that was already open.

Sumac became that door.

Founded more than two decades ago, Sumac Microfinance Bank is not one of Kenya’s giants. It does not have the scale of Safaricom or the reach of Equity Group. But what it possesses is perhaps more important: a deposit-taking licence, a functioning branch network, and regulatory legitimacy.

Those things are difficult to build and almost impossible to fast-track.

For Moniepoint, acquiring Sumac is less about inheriting a bank and more about inheriting permission. With that licence, the company can begin exporting the model that made it powerful in Nigeria: high-speed lending to small and medium-sized businesses that are often overlooked by traditional banks.

That strategy matters in Kenya, where SMEs form the backbone of the economy but remain chronically underfinanced. Most banks still move cautiously, demanding paperwork, collateral, and time.

Moniepoint’s appeal has always been the opposite. It studies the rhythm of a business through its transactions and then offers credit in real time.

But the Kenyan expansion arrives at a complicated moment.

Digital lending in Kenya is no longer the wide-open frontier it once was. Regulators have become increasingly sceptical after years of aggressive loan apps, hidden charges, and predatory practices. Trust has eroded. Oversight has tightened. Entering the market now requires more than speed; it requires restraint, infrastructure, and credibility.

That may explain why Moniepoint is no longer thinking like a fintech startup. It is thinking like an ecosystem.

Just days before the Sumac acquisition, Moniepoint bought Orda, a cloud-based restaurant software company. On the surface, the two deals seem unrelated. One is banking. The other is software. But together, they reveal the company’s real play.

Moniepoint wants to build a “business-in-a-box” for African merchants: payments, banking, inventory management, payroll, and working capital all under one roof. A restaurant owner in Nairobi could use Orda to manage stock, Sumac to access a business account, and Moniepoint to receive a loan before the lunch rush begins.

This is no longer just about transactions. Transaction fees are thin, competitive, and increasingly commoditised. The future belongs to the companies that can live inside the daily operations of a business.

Moniepoint learned that lesson in Nigeria, where fragmented retail markets forced it to become more than a payment processor. It became a partner, an operating system, sometimes even a lifeline.

Now it is betting that Kenya — with its mature mobile money culture, entrepreneurial energy, and expanding SME base — is ready for the same evolution.

The acquisition of Sumac is not Moniepoint’s arrival in Kenya. It is its permission to begin.

And if the company succeeds, this moment may be remembered not as a simple acquisition, but as the day one of Nigeria’s biggest fintechs stopped being national and started becoming African.

For years, building a card product in Africa has felt less like launching a business and more like surviving a maze.

A fintech founder with a good idea could spend months moving between banks, payment processors, regulators, and BIN sponsors before a single card ever reached a customer. One partner delayed the process, another changed the requirements, and suddenly, what should have taken weeks stretched into a year. Many startups never made it through.

Miranda Naidoo knows that frustration intimately.
Before founding Scale in 2022 alongside Barbara Woollams, Naidoo had spent years inside financial services, watching promising companies stall before they could even begin. The problem was not always the product. Sometimes the problem was the machinery behind it — the quiet, invisible infrastructure that determines whether an idea becomes real.

That frustration is what led to Scale.

The South African startup was built around a simple but powerful belief: businesses should not have to become experts in banking bureaucracy just to issue a payment card. They should be able to focus on customers, products, and growth while someone else handles the operational burden.

Now, Scale is taking that idea further through a new partnership with Mastercard, one of the world’s largest payments companies. Together, they plan to simplify card issuance in five African markets: Senegal, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

The partnership introduces what both companies describe as a “one-integration” model. Instead of forcing businesses to negotiate separately with issuing banks, payment networks, processors, and compliance partners, Scale and Mastercard will bring those layers together into a single platform.

It sounds technical, but its implications are larger than they first appear.

Across much of Africa, digital payments have advanced unevenly. Kenya, for example, already has a sophisticated mobile money ecosystem.

Consumers move money quickly through their phones, and card use has increasingly followed, especially in e-commerce and higher-value transactions. In that environment, Scale’s partnership with Mastercard is not trying to replace existing behaviour. It is trying to reduce friction for the fintechs already serving those customers.

For a Kenyan startup, launching a new prepaid card, expense card, or merchant payment solution could now happen faster, with fewer regulatory bottlenecks and lower operational complexity.

But the story becomes even more interesting beyond Kenya.

In Senegal, Ivory Coast, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, cash and mobile wallets still dominate everyday life. Cards are less common, and in many cases, they are still viewed as products reserved for banks or the wealthy. That is where Scale sees its opportunity.

The company believes cards can become more useful, more local, and more inclusive.
Imagine a small business owner in Lusaka receiving a corporate spending card tied directly to her company’s wallet. Or a farmer in Senegal using a companion card linked to a mobile money account. Or a non-profit in Zimbabwe issuing payout cards to beneficiaries instead of relying on cash distribution.

These are not abstract ideas. They are precisely the kinds of use cases Scale and Mastercard say this partnership is designed to unlock.

Scale brings the issuing infrastructure, onboarding tools, and regulatory support. Mastercard contributes its global network, local banking relationships, and decades of market expertise.

Together, they are betting that complexity — not demand — has been the real barrier.

There is a reason investors are paying attention.

In October 2024, Scale raised $700,000 to expand its card-issuing platform across the continent. The timing aligned with a broader shift in African finance. McKinsey estimates that Africa’s financial services sector could generate around $230 billion in revenue by 2025. At the same time, modern card-issuing platforms are expected to account for more than a third of all payment cards issued globally by 2029.

For Mastercard, the partnership is part of a larger ambition to bring more people and businesses into the formal economy. For Scale, it is something more personal. It is a chance to prove that African fintechs do not need to be slowed down by systems that were never built for them in the first place.

Still, ambition is easier than execution.

The next twelve months will test whether Scale can match its promise with operational depth. The company is entering markets where regulations differ sharply, where mobile money already works well, and where trust in new financial products must be earned slowly.

But if Scale succeeds, it may do more than help businesses issue cards. It may quietly change who gets to participate in Africa’s digital economy — and how quickly they can get there.

When Buchi Okoro co-founded Quidax in 2017, the promise was simple: make cryptocurrency accessible to everyday Africans. At a time when digital assets felt distant and technical, Quidax became a gateway — a place where curiosity met opportunity, and where thousands of Nigerians took their first step into crypto.

But building in crypto is never linear. It is a cycle of surges and silence, hype and hesitation. And for founders like Okoro, every market swing is not just a headline — it is a decision point.

In early March 2026, Quidax made one of its hardest decisions yet. During a company-wide meeting, employees across sales, design, and operations learned that their roles had been terminated. The message, framed around performance, arrived quickly. Some staff were contacted shortly after and asked to return work tools. Severance was paid. Salaries were settled. But clarity, for many, was not.

For those outside the room, it looked like another startup downsizing. But inside the story, it was something more deliberate — a shift.

Quidax is changing.

The layoffs are part of a broader pivot toward B2B infrastructure — a move that signals where the company believes the future of crypto in Africa truly lies. Retail trading, once the heartbeat of crypto platforms, has become unpredictable. Volumes rise and fall with global sentiment. Revenue fluctuates. Stability becomes difficult to guarantee.

And so, Quidax is repositioning itself — away from just being a trading platform, and toward becoming a backend engine for crypto-powered financial services.

That shift has been unfolding quietly.

Earlier this year, Quidax shut down its peer-to-peer trading feature — a product that once allowed users to transact directly with each other. Not long after, it partnered with Lisk to support developers building on-chain applications. These are not surface-level changes. They are structural. They point to a company rethinking its identity.

Even as it lets go of certain roles, Quidax continues to hire — but selectively. Sales roles tied to enterprise products remain open. The focus is narrowing. The ambition is becoming more precise.

This is not the first time Quidax has had to adapt under pressure. In 2022, during a global crypto downturn, the company cut about 20% of its workforce. Back then, it was about survival in a collapsing market. Today, it feels more like repositioning for a different future.

Across the ecosystem, Quidax is not alone. Zap Africa recently reduced nearly half of its workforce as it pivoted toward a leaner, AI-driven model. The pattern is clear: crypto startups that once scaled aggressively on the back of trading activity are now being forced to rethink their foundations.

Because the truth is, crypto in Africa is evolving.

It is moving from speculation to utility. From trading apps to infrastructure. From hype cycles to real-world integration.

And in that transition, companies must choose: remain what they were built to be, or become what the market now demands.

For Buchi Okoro, this moment is less about cutting costs and more about redefining direction. The layoffs, while difficult, are part of a larger attempt to align the company with where value is being created — enterprise payments, developer tools, and blockchain infrastructure that businesses can rely on.

But strategy does not erase human impact. Behind every role cut is a story interrupted — careers paused, plans reshaped, uncertainty introduced. These are the quiet costs of startup evolution, often hidden beneath the language of “performance” and “restructuring.”

Still, Quidax’s next chapter will be judged not by the layoffs, but by what comes after.

Can it successfully transition into a B2B powerhouse in a volatile market?
Can it build products that outlast crypto cycles?
Can it turn infrastructure into a sustainable edge?

These are the questions that now define the company.

Because in the end, Quidax’s story is no longer just about helping users buy and sell crypto. It is about whether a Nigerian startup can evolve fast enough to stay relevant in one of the most unpredictable industries in the world.

And sometimes, evolution begins with letting go.

For many Liberian graduates, the hardest part of finishing school isn’t the exams — it’s proving they ever attended.

Abraham Ernest Turay understood this long before he built anything. He had seen graduates chase transcripts across campuses, wait weeks for signatures, and lose opportunities simply because a document couldn’t arrive on time. In a world moving at digital speed, Liberia’s academic records were still stuck in paper trails — vulnerable, delayed, and often questioned.

That gap — between achievement and proof — became personal.

Turay didn’t start EdNova Group to build just another tech product. He started it to confront a quiet but persistent problem: the fragility of trust in systems that are supposed to validate people’s lives. Because a transcript is not just paper. It is identity. It is proof of effort, years condensed into ink and stamps.

And in Liberia, that proof has long been difficult to access.

Universities rely heavily on manual processes — handwritten logs, physical files, email chains that disappear into silence. A single transcript request can take weeks or even months, moving slowly from desk to desk. Along the way, errors happen. Documents get misplaced. Verification becomes uncertain. And for graduates applying abroad, that delay can mean missed deadlines, lost admissions, or rejected job offers.

It is within this reality that TranscriptDove was born.

Developed by EdNova, the platform does something deceptively simple: it removes friction. A student logs in, selects their institution, enters the recipient — a university, employer, or embassy — and submits a request. From that moment, the process becomes traceable. No more guesswork. No more silence.

Behind the interface is a system designed for accountability. Each step is logged. Each action is timestamped. Registrars receive requests within a centralised dashboard, review records, and either approve or flag discrepancies. Once cleared, transcripts are issued digitally — not as static files, but as secure, verifiable documents.

Each transcript carries a unique link and QR code. Anyone receiving it can confirm its authenticity, track its origin, and view the history of actions taken. It is not just a document anymore — it is a living record.

But Turay’s thinking goes further than technology. He understands the uneven realities of infrastructure. Not every institution in Liberia is digitally equipped. So TranscriptDove adapts. Schools with limited capacity can still participate through offline verification processes, with records digitised and uploaded into the system. Inclusion is not optional — it is built in.

At the platform’s launch, Turay framed his vision in simple but weighty terms: security is no longer optional. In a world where data defines identity, institutions must protect both. His words reflect something deeper than product design — a shift in responsibility.

Even within government circles, the significance is clear. Lawmaker Taa Wongbe described the platform not as a luxury, but as a solution — “a painkiller, not a vitamin.” The distinction matters. TranscriptDove is not adding convenience; it is removing a long-standing barrier.

And the scale of that barrier is not small. Liberia has over 80 accredited higher education institutions. Each one represents thousands of students, thousands of stories waiting to be validated beyond borders. EdNova’s ambition is to partner across this entire ecosystem, then extend into other West African countries where similar challenges exist.

But beyond expansion plans and digital frameworks lies the heart of the story: a quiet determination to restore dignity to a process that has long undermined it.

Because when a graduate requests a transcript, they are not asking for a file. They are asking for recognition. For proof that their years meant something. For a system that does not forget them once they leave its gates.

And in building TranscriptDove, Turay is doing something powerful — he is ensuring that those stories are not delayed, distorted, or denied.

He is making them visible. Instantly. Securely. Finally.

Before fibre cables are buried beneath roads and stretched across cities, before faster internet reaches homes and businesses, there is always a quieter phase — one that rarely makes headlines. It is the phase of thinking, planning, negotiating, and sometimes, rethinking everything.

Nigeria is in that phase now.

With a $6.1 million allocation to consultants, the country is not just spending money — it is buying clarity. According to a World Bank procurement report released on March 17, 2026, seven consulting firms and five individual experts have been engaged to help shape the rollout of the national fibre expansion under the Building Resilient Digital Infrastructure for Growth (BRIDGE) Project.

At first glance, the number feels small compared to the scale of the ambition. A $2 billion project designed to expand Nigeria’s fibre network from 35,000 kilometres to 125,000 kilometres — nearly four times its current size — sounds like something that should already be in motion. But infrastructure, especially in a country as complex as Nigeria, does not begin with cables. It begins with decisions.

And decisions, in Nigeria, are rarely simple.

The consultants being brought in are not just advisors. They are interpreters of a system layered with regulatory hurdles, right-of-way disputes, environmental sensitivities, and a fragmented policy environment that has slowed similar projects in the past. A $750,000 legal and regulatory contract reflects just how intricate the landscape is. Another $850,000 earmarked for technical planning hints at the depth of engineering and logistical coordination required before a single trench is dug.

Some of the largest contracts — valued at $1.5 million each — focus on transaction advisory and building research ecosystems through universities. This is where the project reveals its deeper intention. It is not just about laying fibre; it is about building a digital economy that can sustain itself long after the infrastructure is complete.

Behind all of this is a broader shift in how Nigeria is approaching development. Instead of rushing into execution, there is a visible attempt to structure the project carefully, aligning it with global standards and investor expectations. The use of the World Bank’s procurement tracking system signals a push for transparency, something that has often been questioned in large public projects.

The BRIDGE project itself sits at the intersection of ambition and necessity. Internet access in Nigeria remains uneven, with urban centres enjoying relatively stable connectivity while many rural areas remain disconnected. Expanding fibre infrastructure is not just about speed; it is about access — to education, to markets, to opportunity.

Funding reflects the weight of that vision. Over $1.123 billion has already been secured from development partners, including $500 million from the World Bank’s International Development Association and $100 million from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. The federal government has also approved a $1 billion loan, while private investors are expected to contribute at least $1.1 billion.

But funding alone does not build infrastructure. Execution does.

And execution, in Nigeria, has often been where ambition falters.

That is why this $6.1 million matters more than it seems. It represents an acknowledgment — perhaps even an admission — that expertise is needed to avoid the pitfalls of the past. That planning is not a delay, but a necessity.

The consultants will help design frameworks, assess environmental impacts, structure financing, and map out implementation strategies. Some roles are still being procured, others have been signed, and a few have already been cancelled — a reminder that even the planning phase is dynamic, evolving as realities shift.

Disbursement of major funds will depend on measurable progress. The first milestone is modest but symbolic: establishing a special purpose vehicle to oversee the project. From there, the real work begins — the first 5,000 kilometres of fibre, followed by an expansion that could stretch up to 90,000 kilometres.

For a country with Nigeria’s scale, this is more than infrastructure. It is a reset.

A chance to rebuild not just networks, but trust in how those networks are delivered.

Because in the end, fibre cables are not just about connectivity. They are about possibility — the quiet promise that somewhere, in a classroom, a business, or a small community, access to the digital world will no longer be a privilege, but a given.

And sometimes, that promise begins not with construction, but with consultation.

There is a certain kind of pressure that comes with building in Nigeria’s crypto space — the kind that doesn’t announce itself loudly but lingers in every product decision, every regulatory update, every user expectation. It is the pressure to keep moving, even when the ground beneath you keeps shifting.

For Emmanuel Peter and the team at Roqqu, that pressure has become a philosophy.

More than 30,000 users didn’t just sign up to test Roqqu’s futures product during its beta phase — they showed up. They traded. They stayed. And in a market where attention is fleeting and trust is fragile, that kind of engagement means something deeper than growth. It signals belief.

But this moment did not begin with futures trading.

Roqqu started as something simpler — a platform where Nigerians could buy, sell, and swap digital assets in a country where access to global finance often feels restricted. Over time, it added crypto-backed loans, slowly building layers onto its core offering. Yet, as the global crypto ecosystem evolved, simplicity began to look like stagnation.

Across the world, exchanges were transforming into financial ecosystems. Platforms like Luno and Busha began expanding their product stacks. International players were no longer just trading hubs — they were becoming super apps.

Roqqu had a choice: evolve or fade into the background.

The futures product became its answer.

Launched in beta in December 2025, the locally-built derivatives tool wasn’t just another feature — it was a test of identity. Could a Nigerian-built system compete in a space dominated by global infrastructure? Could local engineering match global expectations?

The early numbers offered clarity.

“We already have over 30,000 accounts that started testing and using it during the beta period,” Peter said. But behind that statement is something more telling — confidence. Confidence that what is built within the ecosystem can stand on its own.

Futures trading is not for the passive user. It demands speed, precision, and trust. Fees matter. Experience matters. Timing matters. Roqqu leaned into this reality by keeping trading costs low, introducing a 0.1% fee after beta — a deliberate move in a high-frequency environment where even small charges can accumulate quickly.

But Roqqu’s story does not end at futures.

If anything, this is only the middle of its evolution.

The company is preparing to relaunch crypto cards — a product it once abandoned. In 2022, Roqqu introduced virtual cards but pulled back when reliability became a problem. Payments failed. Trust wavered. And in fintech, broken experiences are remembered longer than successful ones.

Now, they are trying again.

This time, the promise is different: cards that work everywhere — locally and internationally — powered by crypto but built with stronger global partnerships. It is less about redemption and more about unfinished business.

Beyond that, Roqqu is building a prediction market, exploring tokenisation, and experimenting with reward-based systems. These are not random additions; they are signals of a company trying to position itself at the centre of a rapidly shifting industry.

Because the truth is simple — crypto does not wait.

In Nigeria, that urgency is amplified by regulation. The Central Bank of Nigeria, the Nigeria Revenue Service, and the Securities and Exchange Commission Nigeria are reshaping how digital assets are treated under evolving frameworks. Compliance is no longer optional; it is survival.

Roqqu’s expansion is happening within that tension — innovation on one side, regulation on the other.

Even its acquisition of Flitaa in 2025 reflects this broader ambition. It is not just about Nigeria anymore. It is about building something that can stretch across borders while remaining grounded in local realities.

And perhaps that is the most interesting part of this story.

Roqqu is not trying to become the biggest platform overnight. It is trying to become the most adaptable one. A platform that understands that in crypto, standing still is the fastest way to disappear.

So when you look at the 30,000 users on its futures product, you are not just looking at adoption. You are looking at momentum — the kind that comes from a company that has learned, failed, rebuilt, and chosen to move faster than the uncertainty around it.

Because in this space, survival is not about being first.

It is about never standing still.

There is a quiet tension in modern commerce that most people feel but rarely name. You stand at checkout, eyes fixed on something you want — maybe something you need — and the question is no longer can you afford it? but when can you afford it?

For decades, the answer has been credit. And credit, almost always, comes at a cost.

Wesley Billett understood that cost early. Not just in numbers, but in behaviour. In the way people hesitate before purchases, in how debt quietly shapes decisions, in how financial systems have trained consumers to carry the burden of convenience. When he co-founded Happy Pay in 2023, it wasn’t just to build another buy-now-pay-later startup. It was to challenge a long-standing assumption: that flexibility must always be paid for by the consumer.

Now, with a $5 million seed round led by Partech and backed by a mix of global and African investors, Happy Pay is stepping further into that challenge — not cautiously, but with conviction.

At first glance, the model feels almost too simple. Shoppers split payments across two months — 50% now, 50% later. No interest. No deposits. No hidden fees. But simplicity here is deceptive. Because behind that experience lies a fundamental inversion of the traditional credit system.

Instead of charging consumers, Happy Pay charges merchants — not through commissions alone, but through advertising.

This is where the story becomes more interesting.

Happy Pay doesn’t just sit at checkout as a payment option. It lives upstream, in discovery. Its AI engine studies user behaviour, spending habits, and intent signals, then connects shoppers with products they are already likely to want. At that moment — when intent meets opportunity — it removes friction by embedding installment payments directly into the experience.

Merchants don’t pay for impressions. They don’t pay for clicks. They only pay when a transaction happens.

It is commerce financing itself.

For merchants, the results are hard to ignore. The company reports a 190% increase in average basket sizes across its platform. For consumers, the appeal is even clearer: access without punishment. In a country where the average credit-active individual spends a significant portion of their income servicing debt, that difference matters.

South Africa’s credit landscape is not forgiving. Interest rates are high, and access to fair lending remains uneven. Traditional BNPL players — like Klarna, Afterpay, and local competitors — have built their models on merchant fees, late penalties, or interest structures. Happy Pay is attempting something more delicate: removing financial pressure from the consumer entirely and redistributing it across the ecosystem.

But redistribution is never simple.

The real question hovering over Happy Pay is not whether the model works in theory — it clearly does. The question is whether it can sustain itself at scale. Can advertising revenue consistently offset the cost of offering zero-interest payments? Can data-driven targeting remain effective as the user base grows? Can trust be maintained in a system that blends commerce, credit, and advertising so tightly?

These are not small questions. They are structural ones.

Yet, if there is one thing driving Happy Pay forward, it is belief — not just in the model, but in a different philosophy of finance. A belief that value can be created before it is extracted. That if merchants grow, consumers shouldn’t have to sink into debt to make that growth possible.

Since its launch, the company has grown rapidly, reaching over 600,000 users, largely among younger consumers who are both digitally native and financially cautious. It is also expanding beyond digital checkout, working with Mastercard to develop a zero-interest virtual card that functions both online and in physical stores — a move that signals its ambition to become embedded in everyday transactions.

And maybe that is the real story here.

Happy Pay is not just building a payments product. It is attempting to reshape the emotional contract between consumers and money — to remove the quiet guilt, the hesitation, the invisible cost that follows convenience.

In a world where nearly every financial innovation finds a way to charge the user eventually, Happy Pay is asking a different question:

What if it didn’t have to?

For years, Wise circled Nigeria like a visitor unsure whether to stay or leave.

It entered quietly, tested the waters, retreated, and returned again — a pattern that became familiar to anyone watching the evolution of cross-border payments into Africa. At one point in December 2020, the Central Bank of Nigeria openly declared the company unauthorised to operate. For a firm built on transparency and trust, it was more than a regulatory hiccup — it was a moment that exposed how fragile global fintech ambitions can become when they meet local realities.

But Wise has always been a company shaped by persistence.

Founded on the idea of making international money transfers cheaper, faster, and more honest, the British fintech built its reputation by challenging hidden fees and opaque exchange rates. It promised something radical in finance: the real mid-market rate. No markups. No tricks. Just clarity.

And yet, Nigeria — one of the world’s largest remittance corridors — proved to be one of its most complicated markets.

Despite that, money kept moving. Quietly, steadily, and at scale. Wise has processed nearly £600 million in transfers to Nigeria to date, even while operating through third-party partners who controlled the rails and licences. It was a workaround — effective, but limiting. Without its own licence, Wise couldn’t fully control pricing, margins, or the customer experience. It was present, but not planted.

That has now changed.

Wise has finally secured its own International Money Transfer Operator (IMTO) licence in Nigeria — a milestone that signals not just approval, but acceptance. It comes at a time when the relationship between the UK and Nigeria is deepening economically. Following the 2024 Enhanced Trade and Investment Partnership (ETIP), bilateral trade has climbed to £8.1 billion, reflecting a renewed alignment between both countries.

In many ways, Wise’s licence is a quiet outcome of that broader story — where policy, diplomacy, and private ambition intersect.

But the real story is more personal than political.

For over a decade, Wise has been trying to understand markets like Nigeria — not just their regulatory frameworks, but their rhythm. The unpredictability of foreign exchange. The urgency of diaspora remittances. The emotional weight behind every transfer — school fees, hospital bills, family survival.

Nigeria is not just another market. It is a lifeline economy, receiving roughly $20 billion in remittances annually. Every delay, every hidden charge, every failed transaction carries consequences far beyond the app screen.

By securing its own licence, Wise is no longer standing at the edge of that system. It is stepping into it.

This move also suggests a shift in commitment. Over the past year, Wise has been quietly building its African footprint — hiring for expansion roles across the Middle East and Africa, and securing its first African licence in South Africa. But Nigeria was always the missing piece. Not just because of its size, but because of its influence.

Now, with regulatory approval in place, the question is no longer whether Wise can operate in Nigeria — it is how far it will go.

The company could introduce its full ecosystem: multi-currency accounts, business banking tools, and international debit cards tailored to Nigerian users. If that happens, it won’t just be competing on remittances. It will be competing on financial identity — how Nigerians earn, spend, save, and move money globally.

But the landscape has changed.

This is no longer the Nigeria Wise first encountered in 2015. Today, it faces strong, homegrown competitors like LemFi and Moniepoint — fintechs that understand the market not as an expansion opportunity, but as home ground. These companies have also expanded into the UK, building infrastructure that mirrors Wise’s original playbook.

In a sense, the student has become the rival.

And that makes this moment even more interesting.

Because Wise is no longer entering an empty space — it is entering a conversation already in progress. One shaped by innovation, competition, and a new generation of African fintech builders who are no longer waiting to be served, but are building solutions themselves.

Still, for Nigerian consumers, this is a win.

More players mean better pricing. Faster transfers. More transparency. And perhaps, finally, a system that works with the same urgency as the people who depend on it.

After years of hesitation, Wise has made its decision.

It is no longer visiting Nigeria.

It is staying.

There’s a moment in every company’s life when growth stops being about speed and starts becoming about control.

For Cellulant, that moment seems to be now.

Long before Darren Makarem stepped into the role of finance chief, Cellulant had already written itself into Africa’s fintech story — processing millions of transactions daily, connecting businesses across borders, and quietly building the rails that power digital payments across more than 20 markets. But like many companies that scale quickly, it also faced something less visible: the weight of its own expansion.

Leadership exits. Strategic recalibration. The quiet pause that forces a company to look inward.

And then, the rebuild.

Makarem’s arrival is not just another executive hire. It feels more like a deliberate shift in posture. A recognition that the next chapter requires more than ambition — it requires precision.

Before Cellulant, Makarem was the Global CFO at Agoda, where he oversaw a payments network handling over $12 billion in annual transaction volume. But numbers alone don’t tell his story. What makes his journey compelling is the vantage point he brings — one shaped not just by financial oversight, but by proximity to the customer experience.

At Agoda, payments weren’t just backend processes; they were the heartbeat of global travel transactions — multi-currency, high-frequency, always-on. Every delay mattered. Every failure was visible. That kind of environment forces a different kind of thinking — one where finance is not a reporting function, but a real-time enabler of trust.

Cellulant seems to understand this.

“Darren doesn’t just understand the numbers; he understands the customer,” CEO Peter O’Toole said — a statement that reads less like praise and more like a clue to what the company is trying to build next.

Because Cellulant is no longer just trying to exist in Africa’s payments space. It is trying to lead it — at a time when the stakes are rising.

Africa’s digital payments market is projected to reach $1.5 trillion by 2030. That number carries both promise and pressure. Competition is intensifying. Banks are building their own rails. Fintech startups are becoming sharper, faster, more specialised. And infrastructure — the invisible layer that companies like Cellulant operate in — is becoming the real battleground.

Makarem’s experience extends beyond Agoda. His time at Binance as regional CFO for APAC and LATAM, and later as CEO of OnRamp, places him at the intersection of traditional finance and emerging digital assets. It’s a background that hints at where Cellulant might be heading — toward alternative settlement rails, cross-border efficiency, and systems that go beyond conventional banking frameworks.

But timing is everything.

His appointment comes just a month after Cellulant named Michael Muriuki as chief product and technology officer. Together, these moves feel coordinated — like pieces of a larger design. One focused on rebuilding the company’s executive spine, aligning product innovation with financial discipline.

Cellulant is already profitable. It processes over 4.5 million transactions daily. On paper, it is stable. But stability, in fintech, is never the end goal. It is the foundation for something more aggressive.

And that is where Makarem steps in.

“What excites me about Cellulant is the quality of what has already been built,” he said. It’s a telling statement — one that suggests his role is not to reinvent, but to refine. To bring structure to ambition. To ensure that as the company moves faster, it does not lose balance.

In many ways, this is not a story about a new CFO. It is a story about a company learning how to grow again — differently this time. More intentionally. More sustainably.

Because in the end, scaling across Africa is not just about entering markets. It’s about understanding them. Building systems that can hold complexity. And finding leaders who can see both the numbers and the people behind them.

Cellulant’s reset is no longer quiet.

It is becoming visible.

In the quiet corridors of global finance, trust is currency. Not the kind that trades on markets, but the kind that sits behind signatures, audits, and approvals — the invisible thread that binds billion-dollar projects to the people they are meant to serve.

For decades, firms like PricewaterhouseCoopers have operated as custodians of that trust. Their reports shape decisions. Their audits validate reality. Their presence in a project often signals credibility. So when that trust fractures, it does not just ripple — it unsettles entire systems.

That is what makes the recent decision by the World Bank more than a disciplinary action. It is a moment of reckoning.

The World Bank has debarred three PwC-linked entities in Africa — including affiliates in Mauritius, Kenya, and Rwanda — for 21 months after finding them guilty of collusive and fraudulent practices tied to the Eastern Electricity Highway Project. The project itself was no ordinary initiative. It was designed to transmit hydropower from Ethiopia into Kenya, a critical piece of infrastructure meant to power industries, homes, and futures across borders.

But somewhere between intention and execution, the process bent.

According to findings, confidential procurement documents were improperly obtained. Contracts were influenced. Expertise was misrepresented. Subconsultants were not fully disclosed. These are not just technical breaches — they are violations of process integrity, the very backbone of development work.

To understand the weight of this, you have to step back from the legal language and imagine the ecosystem it affects.

A project like the Eastern Electricity Highway is not just about power lines stretching across landscapes. It is about factories that depend on stable electricity, startups building solutions for energy distribution, and communities waiting for consistent light in homes that have known darkness for too long. When governance fails at the top, the consequences cascade downward.

And this is where the story deepens.

The World Bank, through institutions like the International Finance Corporation, does more than fund governments. It fuels private sector growth across emerging markets. Just days before announcing the debarment, the IFC committed $20 million toward high-growth startups in Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa — a reminder that development finance and innovation are increasingly intertwined.

Now, imagine being a startup founder navigating that ecosystem. You are building in a fragile environment, dependent on grants, loans, and partnerships that often trace back to institutions like the World Bank. Then news breaks that one of the world’s most respected advisory firms manipulated processes within that same system.

It changes the atmosphere.

It raises questions about fairness, access, and the unseen forces shaping opportunities. It tightens scrutiny. It forces both investors and entrepreneurs to look closer — at governance, at compliance, at the silent details that determine who wins contracts and who doesn’t.

For PwC, the consequences are immediate. The debarment means exclusion from World Bank-financed projects and operations for nearly two years. In a region where such projects represent significant consulting revenue, the impact is both financial and reputational.

Yet, the story does not end in exclusion. As part of a settlement, the firm admitted misconduct and agreed to corrective measures — internal investigations, disciplinary actions, severing ties with implicated subconsultants, and strengthening compliance systems. The reduced length of the ban reflects that cooperation.

Still, accountability, once questioned, is not easily restored. It must be rebuilt, slowly, deliberately, and under watchful eyes.

What this moment ultimately reveals is something deeper than one firm’s misstep. It exposes the fragile architecture of trust that underpins development work in Africa. It shows how easily influence can tilt systems designed to be impartial. And it reminds us that integrity is not a static badge — it is a continuous practice.

In the end, the real story is not about PwC or the World Bank alone. It is about the evolving standards of doing business in emerging markets. It is about a continent demanding more transparency, more fairness, and more accountability from those who shape its future.

Because in a world where infrastructure projects promise light, growth, and progress, the processes behind them must be just as clean as the energy they aim to deliver.

When Olajumoke Adenowo stepped into Flutterwave’s boardroom in February 2024, few would have predicted that an architect would become an anchor in a fintech powerhouse. Known globally as “Africa’s Starchitect,” Adenowo had spent over three decades reshaping skylines and cultural narratives through architecture. Yet she brought that same structural vision, precision, and foresight to the chaotic, fast-moving world of payments technology.

Her appointment as Flutterwave’s first independent non-executive board member was unconventional — a bold statement that innovation thrives at the intersection of diverse perspectives. “I believe that Africa must evolve its own solutions. Flutterwave is tangible proof of this, with innovation that addresses Africa’s unique challenges,” Adenowo had remarked, signaling a mindset that combined African ingenuity with global relevance.

Over her more than two-year tenure, Adenowo’s fingerprints could be traced across Flutterwave’s strategic moves. Under her guidance, the company expanded its reach into Europe and the Middle East, forged partnerships with East Asian businesses, and unlocked revenue channels that contributed to processing nearly $1 billion in transactions. Her architectural eye for design translated into an ability to see systemic patterns — mapping opportunities, anticipating obstacles, and structuring frameworks that allowed Flutterwave to grow without losing its African identity.

Beyond boardroom metrics, Adenowo’s presence symbolized a convergence of disciplines and cultures. In architecture, she is renowned for weaving Africa’s heritage into contemporary forms, a philosophy captured in her acclaimed book Neo Heritage: Defining Contemporary African Architecture. In fintech, she applied the same principle: local knowledge paired with global standards. It was no coincidence that just months before her departure, she was celebrated as Africa’s sole representative in the Edelman Longevity Labs’ Power of 55 list — a nod to influence that transcends sectors.

Her exit, announced on LinkedIn, was marked by grace and reflection. Adenowo described her board service as a privilege, highlighting the opportunity to contribute to a company that embodies Africa’s capacity to innovate. While the precise reasons for her departure remain private, her legacy is tangible. Flutterwave continues to navigate transformative moves, including the acquisition of Nigerian open banking startup Mono in a deal valued between $25 million and $40 million, and rumoured plans for a future public listing. The seat Adenowo vacated will be closely watched, a testament to the value she added to the board’s composition and perspective.

What makes Adenowo’s journey compelling is not only the accolades — Forbes Woman Africa Entrepreneur of the Year, US Congressional recognitions, and a place on the Forbes ’50 Over 50’ list — but her ability to translate expertise from one domain into another. Architecture taught her to balance aesthetics, functionality, and cultural resonance. In fintech, she balanced risk, opportunity, and vision. In both, she remained committed to shaping structures that endure.

As Flutterwave continues its evolution, Adenowo’s departure reminds the tech ecosystem that innovation is not linear. It is interdisciplinary, human-centered, and informed by experience. Her story encourages leaders to look beyond traditional pipelines, to value perspectives that might at first seem unexpected, and to embrace the artistry in building systems that serve people as much as they serve markets.

Jumoke Adenowo leaves Flutterwave’s board not as a figure stepping away from influence, but as a symbol of what happens when vision, expertise, and courage intersect — whether in concrete, steel, or digital transactions.

In Nigeria, innovation rarely begins in glass towers or venture-backed studios. It begins in small rooms with unstable electricity, in crowded cafés with borrowed Wi-Fi, and in the quiet persistence of founders trying to turn ideas into something real.

For years, those founders have faced the same invisible wall: access. Access to mentorship. Access to capital. Access to the networks that transform ideas into companies.

The iDICE Startup Bridge, a new initiative launched by Nigeria’s federal government, is an attempt to break that wall.

Built under the broader Investment in Digital and Creative Enterprises (iDICE) programme, the Startup Bridge introduces a structured pathway for early-stage founders across the country. It offers two tracks of support: grants of up to ₦10 million for idea-stage entrepreneurs and $100,000 equity investments for startups that have already built a minimum viable product and are ready to scale.

But the deeper story behind the programme is not just about money. It is about geography.

For decades, Nigeria’s startup ecosystem has revolved around a narrow corridor of opportunity — largely Lagos and, to a lesser extent, Abuja. Venture capital, accelerators, and investor networks clustered around these cities, leaving talented founders in other parts of the country with little visibility or support.

The iDICE Startup Bridge is trying to redraw that map.

Designed to reach all 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory, the initiative represents one of the most ambitious early-stage startup programmes the Nigerian government has launched in recent years. By expanding the innovation pipeline beyond traditional tech hubs, the programme acknowledges a simple but powerful truth: talent is not limited by location, only by opportunity.

At the centre of the programme is Founders Lab, a 12-week capacity-building initiative that opened applications on March 16. Each cohort will support 125 aspiring entrepreneurs, guiding them through the critical early steps of building a company — validating an idea, refining a business model, and developing a workable MVP.

For many participants, this will be their first exposure to structured startup education.

Cindy Ezerioha, Head of Founders Lab at iDICE Startup Bridge, describes the programme as a bridge between possibility and proof. Her vision is simple: founders should leave the programme not with just ideas, but with validated business models and clearer pathways to investment.

Every year, 250 participants will pass through the programme’s capacity-building process. The top 100 founders who meet programme milestones will receive grants of up to ₦10 million to support product development or early venture launch.

But the Startup Bridge does not end there.

A second pathway, Growth Lab, will focus on startups that have already moved beyond the idea stage. These are companies with working products, early traction, and the potential to scale. Selected startups will receive $100,000 in equity investment, along with mentorship on governance, operations, and fundraising strategy.

Perhaps more importantly, the programme promises to connect founders directly to institutional investors — an element often missing from public entrepreneurship programmes.

The iDICE initiative itself launched in 2023 with $617.7 million in funding, backed by global development partners including the African Development Bank, Agence Française de Développement, and the Islamic Development Bank. The programme’s first startup investment came in late 2025 through Ventures Platform, one of Africa’s most active seed-stage venture capital firms.

Implementation of the Startup Bridge rests with the Bank of Industry, an institution that has long served as a backbone for enterprise financing in Nigeria. In its latest financial report, the bank revealed it had disbursed ₦636 billion to enterprises across multiple sectors, including ₦43 billion specifically to digital and creative industries.

Vice President Kashim Shettima, who chairs the iDICE Steering Committee, believes the programme could reshape early-stage entrepreneurship in the country by giving young innovators a real chance to build or scale businesses.

Still, the programme faces a crucial test. Early-stage founders do not only need funding — they need mentorship, networks, and consistent guidance. Whether iDICE can deliver that high-touch support at scale will determine whether the initiative becomes another policy experiment or a genuine engine of innovation.

Applications for the first Founders Lab cohort close on April 20, 2026, and will be evaluated through a merit-based process.

Somewhere in Nigeria today, a founder with a fragile prototype and a stubborn belief in their idea is likely filling out that application form. For them, the iDICE Startup Bridge is more than a government programme.

It is a chance — perhaps the first real one — to turn imagination into enterprise.

The African creator economy has always carried a certain optimism — a belief that the internet could give writers, designers, teachers, filmmakers, and storytellers the freedom to build livelihoods beyond traditional gatekeepers. Platforms rose to serve this dream, promising creators tools to sell knowledge, courses, communities, and digital products to audiences across borders.

But every growing industry eventually reaches a moment where idealism collides with ambition.

In Lagos this March, that collision played out in public.

The Landmark Event Centre was buzzing with excitement as The Moment 2026 unfolded between March 13 and March 15. Curated by Mainstack, the conference aimed to become the largest gathering of African creators — a space where thousands of digital entrepreneurs could share ideas, attend panels, and imagine the future of online creativity on the continent.

Then the billboards appeared.

Large banners bearing the Selar logo and taglines such as “Create with intention” and “Create what sells” were mounted prominently near the venue. For many attendees arriving for Mainstack’s event, the ads felt like an unexpected interruption — almost as if a rival had slipped into someone else’s celebration.

To some observers, it looked like a calculated ambush.

To Selar’s leadership, it was simply competition.

Selar CEO Douglas Kendyson, a former engineer at Paystack and Flutterwave, maintained that the placement had been cleared with venue operators beforehand. In his view, the uproar surrounding the banners said more about the hypersensitivity of the ecosystem than the act itself. “A little playful competition never hurts anyone,” Selar stated amid the backlash.

But Mainstack reportedly objected strongly, and the banners were removed soon after.

What might have remained a small marketing spat quickly escalated into something far more personal.

Part of the tension stems from the identities of the companies themselves. Founded in 2016, Selar built its reputation quietly and methodically. It became a dependable infrastructure layer for creators selling digital products — courses, e-books, tickets, memberships. Bootstrapped and pragmatic, the company now serves more than two million users and has processed over $26 million in payouts.

Selar’s philosophy has always leaned toward utility over spectacle: build tools that simply work.

Mainstack represents a different era of creator platforms.

Launched in 2022 by Ayobami Oyaleke and Olamide Akinola, the company positions itself less as a storefront and more as an operating system for the digital entrepreneur. Its polished design language, link-in-bio ecosystem, and lifestyle-driven branding resonate strongly with younger creators seeking not just functionality, but identity.

The friction between these philosophies reached a boiling point during The Moment 2026.

In a move that stunned observers, Mainstack announced Milton Tutu, Selar’s former Chief Marketing Officer, as its new CMO. Almost immediately afterward, coordinated posts began circulating on X with nearly identical messages declaring allegiance to Mainstack.

Kendyson responded with a fiery thread, accusing competitors of orchestrating a coordinated PR attack and revealing that Tutu had been fired prior to joining Mainstack. He also alleged ongoing misinformation campaigns aimed at damaging Selar’s reputation by questioning its fees, payouts, and product quality.

What started as billboards had evolved into a full-blown public feud.

Yet beneath the drama lies a deeper truth: the African creator economy is expanding rapidly, and the stakes are rising with it. Analysts estimate the sector could grow from roughly $5 billion in 2025 to nearly $30 billion by 2032. That growth has transformed platform competition from a quiet race for users into a high-visibility struggle for market leadership.

And Selar and Mainstack are no longer alone.

New entrants such as Nestuge and Leenkies are entering the ecosystem with fresh ideas and new positioning strategies. Leenkies founder Tayo Aina, responding to the controversy, offered a calmer perspective — describing his product as a universal link hub where creators can connect Selar, Mainstack, or any other platform.

For many creators, that neutrality is appealing. It suggests the future may not belong to a single dominant platform but to an interconnected ecosystem.

Meanwhile, The Moment 2026 itself continued despite the controversy. Over 4,000 creators attended panels across three stages, networking sessions buzzed with activity, and cultural figures — including the Ooni of Ife — lent symbolic support to the idea that African creators are custodians of cultural storytelling.

The conference achieved what it set out to do: capture the industry’s attention.

Ironically, the rivalry only amplified that attention.

In the end, the banner controversy may be remembered less for the ads themselves and more for what they revealed — that Africa’s creator economy is entering a new chapter, one where competition is sharper, ambitions are louder, and the battle for the loyalty of creators is only just beginning.

Chinese brain–computer interface startup Gestala has raised $21.6 million just two months after launching, positioning itself as a fast-rising contender in the global race to decode and interact with the human brain. Led by serial entrepreneur Phoenix Peng, the company is developing a non-invasive ultrasound-based BCI system designed to unlock new treatments for chronic pain, neurological disorders, and mental health conditions.

Phoenix Peng has spent much of his career building technology companies that live at the edges of possibility. Some entrepreneurs chase market trends; Peng prefers the frontier, the places where science, ambition, and uncertainty collide. That instinct has now carried him into one of the most ambitious fields in modern technology: brain–computer interfaces.

His latest venture, Gestala, has already drawn global attention. Just two months after launching, the Chinese startup secured $21.6 million (CN¥150 million) in funding, reaching a valuation estimated between $100 million and $200 million. The round, co-led by Guosheng Capital and Dalton Venture with participation from Tsing Song Capital, Gobi Ventures, Fourier Intelligence, Liepin, and Seas Capital, was heavily oversubscribed, with investor commitments exceeding $58 million.

The funding marks the largest early-stage investment in China’s brain–computer interface industry, a signal that investors believe the next breakthrough in human–machine interaction may come from unexpected places.

To understand why, one must look beyond Gestala itself and into Peng’s wider vision. He is also the force behind NeuroXess, another BCI company focused on implantable brain interfaces. With Gestala, however, he is pursuing something different, a system that communicates with the brain without surgery.

That distinction matters.
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For years, the most visible names in BCI development, including companies in the United States pushing implantable electrode systems, have relied on invasive procedures that require opening the skull to place tiny sensors directly in brain tissue. While these technologies hold promise, the medical risks and psychological barriers of brain surgery have slowed widespread adoption.

Peng believes the future may lie elsewhere.

Gestala is developing a non-invasive ultrasound-based brain–computer interface, using advanced phased-array ultrasound to interact with neural circuits. Unlike electrode implants that access limited regions of the brain, ultrasound can potentially reach deeper neural structures and influence larger areas simultaneously. In theory, it could both monitor brain activity and stimulate or suppress it with remarkable precision.

The approach places Gestala in a rapidly emerging category within the global BCI ecosystem, one that is gaining attention from investors and neuroscientists alike.

The company’s ambitions are not purely technological. They are deeply medical.

Gestala’s first research focus is chronic pain management, a condition affecting millions of people worldwide. Academic studies suggest ultrasound stimulation may significantly reduce pain levels by altering neural signaling in key brain regions. If successful, the technology could offer relief without long-term pharmaceutical dependence.

But Peng’s team is thinking much further ahead. Researchers at Gestala are exploring applications in depression, PTSD, autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and stroke rehabilitation. Longer-term possibilities include interventions for Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and essential tremor, conditions that remain among the most difficult challenges in neuroscience.

The startup is currently studying six to eight potential medical indications, though most remain in early research phases rather than clinical trials.

Part of Gestala’s strategy relies on something less glamorous but equally powerful: speed. China’s integrated manufacturing ecosystem allows companies to move from prototype to production faster than many Western competitors. Peng plans to use the new funding to accelerate research and development, expand the team from 15 to about 35 employees by the end of the year, and build a dedicated manufacturing facility.

The company also aims to complete its first-generation prototype before year’s end, an aggressive timeline for a startup operating in one of technology’s most complex fields.

Beyond hardware, Gestala is building what it calls an “Ultrasound Brain Bank.” This large clinical dataset will collect neural signals to train artificial intelligence models capable of decoding brain activity. In the future, these datasets could support advanced neurological diagnostics or personalized treatments.

Despite growing geopolitical tensions between the United States and China, Peng remains optimistic about global collaboration in deep technology. He believes the future of neuroscience depends on combining the strengths of both ecosystems: America’s scientific talent and China’s clinical research capacity and manufacturing scale.

In Peng’s mind, brain–computer interfaces are not simply gadgets or futuristic experiments. They represent a new language, a way for humans to communicate with the brain itself.

And if Gestala succeeds, that language may soon begin to speak back.

Nigeria’s tech regulator, NITDA, is seeking 37 innovation hubs, one from each state and the FCT, for the fifth cohort of its iHatch Startup Incubation Programme. The initiative, supported by the Japan International Cooperation Agency, aims to strengthen Nigeria’s startup ecosystem beyond Lagos and Abuja by empowering local innovation hubs to nurture and prepare startups for growth and investment.

On any given afternoon in Nigeria, ideas are being born in places far from the towering tech offices of Lagos or the policy corridors of Abuja. In quiet university labs in Makurdi, in modest co-working spaces in Osogbo, inside classrooms converted into coding studios in Yola, young founders sketch solutions to problems only they understand deeply. Yet for many of them, the dream of building a startup strong enough to attract funding often collapses not because the idea is weak, but because the ecosystem around them is fragile.

This quiet imbalance is something the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) has been trying to confront. Through its subsidiary, the Office for Nigerian Digital Innovation (ONDI), the agency has opened applications for the fifth cohort of the iHatch Startup Incubation Programme, an initiative that aims to do something unusual: build the ecosystem first, before focusing on the startups themselves.

For the new cohort, the programme is searching for 37 innovation hubs, one from each of Nigeria’s 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory, to serve as local implementation partners. These hubs will act as state-level managers of the incubation programme, guiding startups within their communities through structured development pathways.

At the centre of this approach is Victoria Fabunmi, the National Coordinator of ONDI, whose vision for iHatch goes beyond the usual playbook of startup accelerators. While many programmes compete to attract promising founders into major cities, Fabunmi’s thinking moves in the opposite direction. If innovation is happening everywhere, then support systems should exist everywhere too.

Nigeria’s startup ecosystem has grown rapidly over the past decade, producing unicorns and attracting global venture capital. But the growth has been uneven. The gravitational pull of Lagos and Abuja means that most funding, mentorship networks, and incubators remain concentrated in those cities. Founders outside these hubs often operate in isolation, navigating the complex journey of building a startup without the benefit of structured support.

The iHatch programme attempts to correct that imbalance by strengthening the very institutions that support founders. Instead of selecting startups directly, it selects innovation hubs that already understand their local environments. Once selected, each hub will recruit and manage about five startups, guiding them through an incubation process designed to improve their readiness for growth, partnerships, and investment.

The approach reflects a deeper understanding of ecosystems. Startups rarely succeed alone; they flourish when surrounded by mentors, infrastructure, community, and access to opportunities. By investing in hubs, NITDA hopes to create a distributed support system capable of nurturing founders in every corner of the country.

The initiative is being implemented in partnership with the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), a collaboration that underscores the international interest in Nigeria’s growing digital economy. Across Africa, startup ecosystems have been expanding rapidly. In 2025 alone, African startups raised $3.42 billion, signaling a sustained appetite from global investors for innovation on the continent.

Yet funding headlines often hide a deeper reality: many talented founders never reach the stage where investors can discover them. Without mentorship, incubation, and structured development programmes, promising startups struggle to mature into investable businesses.

This is precisely the gap iHatch aims to bridge.
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Selected hubs will receive operational support, resources, and access to structured tools designed to standardize incubation quality across Nigeria. While specific grant amounts have not been disclosed, high-performing hubs may receive rewards based on their impact during the programme.

But the real prize is not financial.

According to Fabunmi, the programme’s deeper goal is to cultivate ecosystem leaders, people committed to strengthening local startup communities and ensuring that founders in smaller cities have the same opportunities as those in Nigeria’s established tech clusters.

Eligible hubs must have operated for at least one year and demonstrate active engagement within their local innovation communities. They must also possess the infrastructure needed to host incubation activities. Applications for the fifth cohort close on March 16, marking another step in Nigeria’s ongoing effort to decentralize innovation.

If successful, iHatch could quietly reshape Nigeria’s technology landscape. Instead of innovation flowing from a few dominant cities, it may begin to emerge from dozens of communities simultaneously, each powered by local hubs that understand their founders’ realities.

In a country of immense talent and complex challenges, the future of innovation may not belong to one city alone. It may belong to the entire map.

French health insurance startup Alan has reached a €5 billion valuation following a €100 million funding round led by Index Ventures. But behind the valuation lies a deeper story about founders who believed health insurance could feel human again, and built a company that merges technology, care, and trust into one digital experience.

In most people’s lives, health insurance enters quietly and awkwardly, as paperwork, bureaucracy, and a series of forms that feel designed more for institutions than for human beings. For Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve, that disconnect was impossible to ignore.

Long before Alan became one of Europe’s most valuable health tech companies, Samuelian-Werve was fascinated by how technology could reshape systems people had learned to tolerate rather than love. Insurance, particularly in Europe, felt frozen in time, complicated, slow, and emotionally distant from the people it was supposed to serve.

So in 2016, alongside his co-founder Charles Gorintin, he launched Alan, not simply as another insurance company, but as a digital-first rethink of healthcare coverage itself.

Nearly a decade later, that experiment has grown into a €5 billion company.
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Alan’s latest valuation follows a €100 million funding round led by Index Ventures, with participation from Greenoaks, Kaaf, and SH, as well as high-profile backers including Shopify founder Tobi Lütke and French football star Antoine Griezmann. The new valuation marks a rise from €4.5 billion in 2024, a notable milestone at a time when many European unicorns are losing their billion-dollar status amid tighter capital markets.

Yet the funding story is only part of the journey.

Today, Alan serves more than one million people, including employees, freelancers, and retirees. Its workforce has grown to around 740 employees, building a platform that blends traditional insurance coverage with digital wellness services.

The Alan app has become the centre of this experience. Users can manage reimbursements, consult doctors online, track health habits, and access preventive care tools, all within a single interface designed to remove friction from healthcare.

For Samuelian-Werve, technology was never meant to replace care; it was meant to remove the barriers around it.

That philosophy has quietly guided the company’s growth.

Alan made history early in its life when it became the first new independent health insurance company licensed in France since the 1980s, a remarkable feat in a highly regulated sector. Since then, the startup has expanded beyond its home country into Belgium and Spain, signing major corporate clients such as HP and Volkswagen.

More recently, Alan entered Canada, securing licences across all provinces and beginning commercial operations there. The move signals the company’s ambition to build a global health platform rather than a purely European insurer.

Financially, the company is scaling quickly.

Alan reported €785 million in annual recurring revenue in 2025, representing a 53% increase compared with the end of 2024.

While the company has historically posted losses, about $61 million in 2023 and $56 million in 2024, it says those losses are shrinking rapidly relative to revenue, bringing the business closer to operational break-even.

The company has already reached operational profitability in France, its largest market.

But Samuelian-Werve isn’t rushing to declare victory. Instead of focusing purely on profits, Alan is prioritizing product improvements, international expansion, and deeper investments in technology and artificial intelligence.

That focus is not accidental.

The CEO is also a co-founding advisor and board member at Mistral AI, one of France’s fastest-rising artificial intelligence companies. The overlap reflects his belief that AI could transform healthcare experiences, from faster claims processing to personalized wellness guidance.

Investors appear comfortable with Alan’s strategy. The company is targeting $1.16 billion in annual recurring revenue by 2026, even if that means delaying full profitability in the short term.

For many observers, Alan represents something larger than a successful startup.

It reflects a generational shift in how Europeans expect healthcare services to work, transparent pricing, simple digital tools, and preventative wellness rather than reactive bureaucracy.

Samuelian-Werve once described the company’s mission as building “a healthcare companion for life.” That phrase reveals something essential about Alan’s trajectory: it isn’t trying to reinvent insurance overnight. Instead, it is slowly transforming the relationship people have with it.

And in a sector that rarely inspires loyalty or trust, that may prove to be its most disruptive innovation.

At €5 billion, Alan is no longer just a startup challenging an industry. It is becoming a blueprint for what the next era of healthcare infrastructure might look like: digital, human-centered, and quietly ambitious.