Flutterwave CEO on why African fintechs are trying to become banks

In April, Flutterwave, a pan-African fintech unicorn, secured a national microfinance banking licence through its acquisition of open banking startup Mono. It joined a growing group of Nigerian fintechs moving into regulated banking. In January, Paystack acquired Ladder Microfinance Bank, while Moniepoint secured a microfinance banking licence in 2025.

African fintechs are moving from only processing payments to holding deposits, providing credit and offering other banking services. For Olugbenga “GB” Agboola, cofounder and CEO of Flutterwave, African fintechs are becoming banks because payments alone are no longer enough.

Speaking at Moonshot in Lagos on Wednesday, Agboola said Flutterwave’s decision to obtain a national microfinance banking licence was driven by the need to control more of the infrastructure behind its payments business.

“What we’ve seen is you cannot provide a great payment experience if you don’t control the entire stack, or at least a big piece of the stack,” Agboola said. “And in most of those large stacks, it’s easy to source a third party who does not share the same level of focus that you have.”

Flutterwave has processed more than $40 billion in lifetime payments, giving it a large existing payments business to build its banking strategy around. The company has also said that more than 2 million businesses use its platform. Agboola said the scale of the payments business also exposed the limitations of relying on third-party financial institutions. If a partner bank goes down, parts of Flutterwave’s payment infrastructure can go down with it.

“We didn’t choose to do banking for the sake of banking,” Agboola said. “We chose to do banking to create more depth for our customers.”

The move into banking also gives Flutterwave a path into lending, an area where the company believes its existing transaction data could give it an advantage. Agboola said Flutterwave can see how businesses and consumers use its payment infrastructure, including when customers attempt transactions without sufficient funds or when businesses have receivables but need working capital immediately.

However, Flutterwave’s lending strategy is not immediately focused on becoming a mass-market lender. Agboola said the company is starting with liquidity and working-capital infrastructure, including pre-funding payouts for companies that need to make payments in Africa before receiving their own funds.

In June, Flutterwave raised a Series E round at a $3.25 billion valuation after Ripple invested an undisclosed amount in the company. The partnership also integrated Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin into Flutterwave’s payment infrastructure.

The deal was part of a larger stablecoin strategy that followed the company’s partnership with Turnkey and Nuvion to launch stablecoin balances and embedded wallets supporting USDC and USDT. In June, it also partnered with Tempo to build stablecoin-powered payment and settlement infrastructure for African payments.

Agboola said the company is seeing businesses encounter stablecoins as a practical payment option, particularly when paying international suppliers.

“We’ve built what I call the largest deployment of stablecoins in Africa, where we support all the blockchains and stablecoins,” Agboola said.

The expansion is happening against a backdrop of rising competition between fintechs and traditional banks for control of customers’ financial relationships. Flutterwave says it currently operates across more than 35 countries and has more than 50 global licences.

&&&

Source link