Flutterwave and the Future of African Payments

My pleasure, Colin. Great to be here.

So Flutterwave was inspired because of the barrier you see in payment in Africa today. As you know, every country has its own rails, its own rules, its own amazing ecosystems, but they are closed. Africa is not offline, but Africa in my opinion is disconnected from itself. There is M-Pesa in Kenya, mobile money in Ghana, NIP in Nigeria, which all work seamlessly, very well ahead of their times in each of these countries. However, it's not interoperable. The insight was very simple: Africa does not need one currency to trade like one market; we just need an infrastructure that connects everything together. We built on the belief that if you could unify payment acceptance, settlement, and connectivity, African businesses can suddenly start to perform like they are global. What makes global companies global is just because of one big reason: they have access to big markets. So if you can give the entire African market, the one billion people in Africa, that opportunity and give that access to African businesses because now they can get paid by every person on the continent, that makes the market share even way bigger. So we built a payment superhighway because somebody needed to collapse the decades of fragmentation into one API, and we felt it should be us. And here we are, almost 10 years on that journey.

Nigeria. Our own country. My home country.

You have a point, but let me explain. Small problems don't move a continent, and Africa does not require incremental fixes. Africa requires foundational infrastructure. Payment was the very biggest invisible tax on Africa's growth. A lot of companies that tried to scale African commerce before Flutterwave came on the scene in 2015, 2016, that wave of African e-commerce, a lot of them lost money. A lot of them weren't able to scale. A lot of them were doing things like pay cash on delivery. There was no other choice. They had to find a way to make it work. So we chose this problem because if you crack payments, you unlock trade, commerce, e-commerce, logistics, remittances, capital flows, expansion. Naturally, fixing payments creates a multiplier effect; it lifts entire ecosystems. So we didn't want to build a feature; we wanted to build a continental-scale backbone. That was the intention. And to be very frank, the hardest problems create the deepest moats if you get it right. Fragmented regulation, multiple currencies, over a thousand payment methods across the continent. It was not just a copy-and-paste solution from the West. This is Africa's problem; it needed an African answer in my opinion. And why Nigeria? Nigeria is the toughest market and also the best teacher. If you can build a payment company in Nigeria, you can build one anywhere else in the world. Nigeria gives you scale, complexity, innovation under pressure, diverse payment behavior, multiple rails, regulatory intensity and experience, unrelenting customer demand for reliability. Nigerians will demand the best of the best constantly, and that goes for the rest of Africa as well. So Nigeria forced us to build with resilience, speed, and enterprise-grade infrastructure from day one. Nigeria wasn't just our starting point; it was our training ground, and it prepared us for everywhere else: Ghana, South Africa, Egypt, Rwanda. Even when we left Africa for the UK and US, Nigeria got us ready for those markets. And I think it's a pressure point for continental commerce as well: 200 million people, the largest GDP in Africa, highest adoption rate. That's why we chose Nigeria. Plus, where else can I have an unfair advantage? It's Nigeria.

Experience, they say, is the best teacher. You learn from experience a lot. So I would say go for the market where you can get the best and quickest mileage and where you can get an unfair advantage. That is so important. If you get your unfair advantage and your mileage, that can help you in solving the hardest and biggest problem. So if I should go back in time, I would say go for the market where you can get your best advantage, the most unfair advantage. You need that to scale as a startup. Also, where you can get the best mileage. In my case, if I go back in time and I'm still doing African payments, I would still choose Nigeria again.

Flutterwave got a lot of homegrown support from Nigeria and globally, to be very frank. The reason why a young company with no capital raised in 2016 would apply and get a license was because of the infrastructure that had been built. The regulatory environment is extremely professional and world-class. After we checked all the boxes for what was required, they licensed us. That was so key to our growth as a company. And to be very frank, everywhere else we go in the world, the first thing they ask is, 'Did your own country license you? If they did, then we can give you a chance.' That was the biggest thing we could do. We got support in Nigeria. A lot of angel investors invested in Flutterwave in the early stage. Myself and my co-founders used our network and infrastructure to get that support and started the company. Plus, a lot of our bank partners came to the table to support us. All these banks gave us rails and support to get started as a boarding merchant and scaling. That support has continued even till now. A lot of African banks supported Flutterwave, regulatory support, even government support. The infrastructure was there to allow us to scale from NIBSS to all the systems that had been built. We built on that layer, and that layer held us up. So yes, we got the support required locally and globally. Even investors from YC to Green Visor Capital, CR Ventures, those guys early on backed Flutterwave to get us started. That was very key and important to our growth.

The combination of a lot of factors: it's both a Nigerian thing and a GB thing, a co-founder thing and my team thing. Also, the regulatory maturity at that time. Everything just came together at the right time to help us scale. But that said, a lot of these banks, I did work for them. So I had my former bosses all support me. For example, Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede, the former CEO and co-founder of Access Bank, literally just swooped in and supported Flutterwave from day one. From Access Bank to Standard Bank to others, a lot of these banks came to the table and supported Flutterwave as we grew and scaled our business. Sterling Bank, I can go on and on. So I think it's a Nigerian thing, a my co-founder thing, a GB thing, a my team thing. Everything just came together. Plus, we applied for a license, followed the process, and got a license. We didn't know anybody anywhere. Everything was just the process followed. That was very key and important. So I think it was just right time, right place, right infrastructure. Everything just worked together.

Yes, there is a very vibrant ecosystem right now in Nigeria, the fintech ecosystem, or not even fintech, the entire startup ecosystem itself. It's a very big support community. A couple of days ago, I saw Venture Platform, they led an event where they launched a new fund. Shout out to Dr. There's an example of a Nigerian VC literally building, raising capital, and investing in startups. They've invested in nearly everybody in the ecosystem. There are so many examples like that. There's AfriNurture led by Idris and his team. There's T Ventures led by Pardon. There's a bunch of African VCs who have been amazing. Future Africa, one of your favorite former colleagues. I also have 17 which I built with my family fund. There's constantly people building. There's also Aggressive Capital led by Maria. There are people just building amazing stuff to support the ecosystem. But it's not just Nigerian support; they are pan-African. They might be based in Nigeria, but they are just very global at this point. I think that shows you how they see the opportunity in the system. If you see the energy that people are putting into building amazing things, you actually want to back them. There have been some amazing success stories, from Paystack to Moniepoint to Flutterwave. There are so many amazing stories: PiggyVest, Bamboo, Rise Vest. I can go on and on. It's really a very interesting ecosystem being built and shaped up across the board.

Number one, I would say YC played a major factor in that for us. Being in that community and ecosystem of global founders who are building for different markets and different realities naturally helped us as a company in our quest to scale and raise capital. That said, I think times have changed. When we were starting, there were not enough African VCs investing in Africa beyond the very bold ones who gave us capital early on. But now there's a bigger pool available, at least for the pre-seed, seed, and maybe up to Series A stage. You're seeing a lot of VCs being ready to back African founders and invest in Africa. For me, it's really a function of Africa needing to back Africa first. We know the complexity of our market. We know the problem we're solving. If you tell someone you are building payment infrastructure in Africa, they look at you like, 'If you have a Visa card in the US, it just works.' But that's not the case in Africa. My South African card works for South Africa. My Nigerian card used to not work in South Africa. Now it does, thanks to things getting better. But the point is, those problems are local African problems, and once you leave Africa, they don't exist. So it's hard for a non-African VC to understand the scale of the problem and how much solving it can create value. So I think it's really a function of Africans backing Africa. I think that's very key at this point because we are the ones who understand the complexity and nuances of our market and environment. That is so important. So for me, it's really a question of Africa needs to back Africa. That is starting to happen a lot more at scale. A lot more angel investing is happening. Naturally, it's easier for those foreign VCs to back African companies when Africans have already backed them to a scale where it's now easier for them to understand that this is venture-ready and can actually scale.

I think yes, it is. I think you're right. Having Africans who understand the complexity of Africa, like I said earlier, is very key. It's definitely very important to have Africans in the diaspora who understand Africa, who are of both worlds. They are overseas, they understand exactly what is happening there, and they can bridge that gap between the average non-African investor who wants to invest in Africa. I think the diaspora is a very big network to leverage, maybe not even for investment but for education, for translation. That's also key because how do you expect someone to understand that M-Pesa is fantastic, actually better than Apple Pay, but only works in Kenya? It takes someone to explain it. That is so key. I think community is a very big support network for what we're building across the continent, and leveraging them is a major game changer.

Not too many. Just 30 major countries.

Our roadmap is built around our customer demand. Our customers are broken into three segments: SMBs, consumers, and enterprises. Customers today want to get paid quicker and faster in Africa. They want to be able to accept payment from their customers anywhere in Africa, and we're enabling that right now. If you saw my half-year report that I shared, we processed $1 billion in just one quarter for one segment: global companies who have customers in Africa in Nigeria, Ghana, and South Africa via our virtual account solution. We've built the biggest named IBAN in Africa right now, where we help businesses get paid in Africa locally. These are non-card, account-based payments, which are the bread and butter of the African continent. In just one quarter, we helped merchants in one sector get paid a billion dollars. It's grown massively since then. We're best-in-class infrastructure for helping enterprise companies who are in Africa expand and get paid across the continent and globally, and also global companies who are not in Africa to get paid in Africa. We've built that and we're scaling it. Our goal is to go deeper, not even wider. For SMBs, we want to empower every SMB in Africa. SMBs are the bedrock of the African economy across Lagos, Johannesburg, Lusaka, Nairobi, Cairo. We want to help the average SMB expand the market size they can access. Why can't a business in Cairo sell to a customer in Lagos? The barrier used to be payment. Not anymore. With Flutterwave, we enable that payment to happen seamlessly. Currency conversion happens, fees are managed, and you get paid as a small business anywhere in Africa. We're making that happen right now. Last but not least, consumers: helping Africans in the diaspora send money back home and get it anywhere they are on all these platforms. We're building blockchain payments. We just partnered with Polygon recently to make that happen. What does that really mean? We want to help make it easy for an SMB to pay their suppliers quicker. Today, there's a shift happening in cross-border payments. Global suppliers are telling their business clients that if you want me to supply you quicker, payment with stablecoin settlement time is instantly. Payment with SWIFT is 5 days. Payment with wires is 2-3 days or one day depending on the wire type. So we're getting customers saying, 'I want to pay my supplier in China, my supplier in London, my supplier in Indiana in the US, and they're asking me if I've got stablecoin, I can pay them on Friday at 2 a.m. and they get the money Friday at 2 a.m. If I pay with SWIFT on Friday, that money gets there on Monday or Tuesday.' SWIFT in Africa still goes from your country to New York to destination. So we're building stablecoin infrastructure on the blockchain to enable payment types like USDC, USDT on our platform. That is so key for us because we see the opportunity there. We are an interoperable superhighway for payment, and our goal is to help ensure that any payment type that our business customers want to accept, we support that. With stablecoin gaining massive adoption, we have to enable that. So right now, we're working on our stablecoin payment infrastructure, which will be in pilot before the end of this year with a few select customers. The goal is to make it easy for enterprise clients to get settled in real time, make it simpler for SMBs to pay suppliers in real time, and make it easier for consumers sending money from anywhere in the world back to Africa to make that payment quicker and faster due to the openness of the stablecoin blockchain. That's where we are going right now: building that currency infrastructure that gives an African business, an African consumer, and any enterprise company getting paid or paying in Africa access to all major currencies on their platform with our partner banks, all visible from the Flutterwave dashboard. That's our current roadmap right now.

I think it's important to know that stablecoin does not mean the absence of rules. The rules still need to be followed. Flutterwave, for example, is the most licensed non-bank entity in Africa right now. We know exactly how to ensure we stay within the confinement of our regulation. If you're not allowed to do cross-border money transfer in a country, it doesn't matter if it's stable or not, you shouldn't do that. That's following the rules. Where you are allowed to do it, you can do it with infrastructure that makes it quicker and faster. The good thing is that for our SMB clients, they do not need to go and find a stablecoin vendor to convert their fiat to stable. They can do that on our dashboard because we enable that within what is allowed by the country of the customer and the regulations that govern that. So everywhere we're licensed to do payment, stablecoin is payment. It's just another form factor of payment. Same way you pay with PayPal or pay with your card, stablecoin is just another form factor of payment. It's not speculative, it's not trading, it's just payment. All payment types are supposed to be accepted by payment processors. So we also have to accept stablecoin because it's a form factor for payment. That's the way we are addressing this. I read in the news that maybe Mukuru launched a stablecoin savings account in South Africa because they have the license to do so. The point is, stablecoin will not bypass regulations. That's where I sit. Businesses who use our platform do not need to go and find a stablecoin partner; they can do everything on Flutterwave instantly. You're a business, you receive fiat, you want to move that dollar to stablecoins, that should happen seamlessly on the platform in line with the relevant existing regulations.

One important answer which is already in the works is PAPSS, the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System by Afreximbank. Why is that important? They are solving a very big problem. They are connecting all the countries together. They are taking the slow, hard way to do it, which is important: getting central banks to sign bilateral agreements with each other. When that comes of age, it's already happening, it's already of age in some sense. There's a market whereby today Ghana to Nigeria, the PAPSS link is working, it's live. There are companies who are live on it already. That will naturally reduce the cost of money transfer and reduce the cost of transactions. We are betting heavily on PAPSS as Flutterwave. We're currently integrating PAPSS because we believe in what it can do. That's the kind of infrastructure we need in Africa. PAPSS basically gives the infrastructure that connects all the countries together. That's a layer that Flutterwave can build on and scale through. That is so important. I think that is a big deal that is solving that problem. I know it's not everywhere yet and it's still very early days for PAPSS, but some of the things they've done, I've been very impressed. The cost of transfer has been brought down tremendously, and the speed of transfer has also been cut down tremendously. That's the infrastructure we're building. When a customer comes to Flutterwave, expect that by next year Q1, you'll see your transfers go faster and get cheaper because PAPSS will be live. When everything PAPSS makes it work, it will generate real-time settlement between two countries, real-time infrastructure, real-time instruction communication. The money doesn't have to move from Nigeria to New York to Ghana. It can go straight from Lagos to Accra because PAPSS is now the middle, and both central banks are aware and facilitating the movement of money. So I imagine a world whereby PAPSS is now global on the continent, and transfers from Nigeria to Ghana can happen in minutes, not days.

I think you're right. But you have to start small. It's a big problem being solved. Again, it's a hard problem to be solved. PAPSS, with their leadership under Mr. Michael Ogbalu, they have the right goal in mind and are executing on that goal seamlessly. But you've got to start small, and that's what they're doing. They started small. They've done Nigeria and Ghana. They're doing each country step by step. While it might take time to get it all done, once we start seeing the progress happening between some countries that are live, that will naturally accelerate things to move quickly as well.

We are helping today in South Africa. We're live in South Africa. We're helping global merchants and local ones get paid locally in South Africa right now. Our best asset as a company is that we are the only ones who cover Africa. If you want to get paid across the entire continent, Flutterwave just works for you. 30 countries anywhere in Africa you want to get paid, we have the infrastructure and it works. We can make it happen. That's our sweet spot. We love to work for clients who want to do payments across multiple markets, not just one market. That's why you see all our global clients choose us for that reason. With one API, they can just get Africa done and dusted. No one else has that edge today in Africa.

We are going deeper in Africa deliberately. Africa is our sweet spot. We want to be the premier African payments company that makes payment simple in Africa. That said, for example, last year we launched in Bahrain and Turkey for Uber. Because we have infrastructure, we partner with a rich partner who helps us with non-African markets, but we don't go there directly. We partner in those markets. But our focus where we have direct infrastructure is Africa, and that's where we want to go deeper.

We are a startup, Colin. So definitely. Hell yes. Bring it on.

10 is still pretty young. So we're still a startup. Maybe when we're like 20, but right now, we're still a startup.

There's not one moment; there are multiple moments. One big deal was when we started getting put into rooms we never even asked to enter. That was one big piece. When companies trusted an African startup with their business, like Uber and others, that for us was a huge validation that Africa did not just need payment, Africa needed reliable infrastructure that people can build their business on. When our culture started driving our growth, not the other way around. People work like owners, not employees. The talent wants to be here. We got a huge talent demand of people wanting to work at Flutterwave. Our team operates with audacity and accountability. Innovation becomes a habit for us, not a lucky moment. We're constantly innovating. Some will be misses, some will be hits, but we just keep going. Then we built that momentum where our product-market fit is now unstoppable. I would say we knew we had something when people stopped asking 'Who are you?' and started saying 'Thank God you exist. You empower my business. I am growing my firm because you exist as a company.' That's when we know that we are more than a startup; we are now an infrastructure. That is very important. But it's not a destination; it's a journey. You keep on reinventing yourself, keep on rebuilding, keep on going, keep on scaling. It's not a sprint; it's a marathon. I think right now I know it's a marathon, not a sprint. We just keep doing what we know how to do best: solving problems, scaling for our customers, ensuring that our mission of truly connecting Africa to the world through seamless payment is never in jeopardy. We understand that our north star is still our north star, and we just keep going through the thick and thin, the ups and downs. That's when you know yes, we have something here, and we are willing to fight for it and keep going as a company.

The hardest one for me was going from the person who does everything to the person who empowers people who do everything. We had to go from doing things to bringing people to do it. That was one big piece for me in the early days. I wrote product specs, I went to sell, I talked to banks, talked to everybody. But as the company scaled, you have to let go of control but not accountability. You have to trust your leaders to make the decisions they need to make. That is uncomfortable but very necessary as you grow and scale. From speed to structure, creating governance, predictability, discipline, becoming an architect, not an operator. Knowing that every sentence that I make can shape strategy and culture. You don't speak casually; you speak deliberately. Leadership is not about being liked; it's about doing what you need to do. It can be uncomfortable, but it is what it is. The top is very lonely as a CEO, but you carry it anyway with a steadiness that is required. You have to stand on business literally. So my main job right now is just focusing on people, not tasks. The right leaders, setting clarity, removing blockers, getting the mission protected, even having to break down walls. Going from chief doer to chief enabler. On my Slack, I still wrote 'Chief Enabler' right now. That is very important. Once you cross that point, the company starts to evolve. The shift might be subtle, but it's happening slowly, and you start building being more structured, more focused, and things get done.

That part was very true, by the way. You get older with the company, it gets easier. But frustration is part of growth. There's no growth process where you don't get frustrated. If you're not getting that, then you're not growing. That's where I see it. When you move from founder to CEO, you give up the comfort of some things. That's tough but required. What keeps me steady is the mission. There's no growth in life that doesn't come with frustration. But if I empower leaders, they will become generational. I see that. That mindset shift will kill the frustration. So you choose long-term impact over short-term comfort. There are things I want to do myself for sure, and I still want to do them myself. Yes. But the trade-off is not worth it because my job is not doing that work anymore. I've hired people to do that job for me, and I have to let them do their job and hold them accountable to doing their job very well. Being the CEO fills me. It keeps me sharp and improves my leadership. It makes me build better people and better systems. So for me, I embrace that entire thing: from scale to structure. That's the way I see it. It's part of growth. You can't build something like steel without fire. Steel must go through fire to become steel. That is key. There's no other way to do that in my opinion.

There's a lot of that. There's a learning for every season, every quarter. Like every founder, I've made mistakes. The biggest learning is simple for me: sometimes you have to slow down to fix them. That's number one. I wish, for example, I was able to invest in talent earlier in the company, but again, we didn't have that much capital at the beginning. We were bootstrapping literally. So there was almost a limit to what we could do. We did what we could with what we had. But as you grow fast, sometimes culture and process don't catch up. So you have to be intentional about formalizing communication, a strong middle layer, creating repeatable playbooks from day one. That's what I've learned. Also, learning that you have to overcommunicate the mission. You have to constantly, as a CEO, keep talking about the mission, the why behind decisions, the direction of travel, why we're going where we're going, what is expected in standards. Learning that you have to hire fast and fire fast. I'd love to do that again if I could. Fire faster is very important because if somebody is not a culture fit, they are toxic to the culture, and you have to move on. Founders romanticize a lot, but leadership is not a sprint. One thing I'm learning to do is to rest better, create better boundaries, have better coaching. That is how you learn. But there's a lot of things we've learned. We learned to see our regulator as a stakeholder, not just a regulator. You look at an investor, customer, your colleagues. Regulators are your stakeholder. Once you see them like that, you bring them into your conversation, into your thinking, into what you are building, rather than surprising them. Because to be frank, their job is not to help you succeed; their job is to protect the ecosystem. Once you start learning that over time, you start getting better. That pain became discipline, and that discipline became resilience. That's what keeps you standing and keeps you going. It's part of the journey. Every founder that's successful, from Jeff Bezos to Henry Ford to Alfred Sloan, they all went through the same process. It's part of building. When you build a company from scratch, that's what you have to go through. When you join a company at a majority level, you don't see that piece, but somebody paid the price to build that company. It's part of the building phase. A very important thing here is to turn that pain into fuel, turn discipline into resilience, and just keep going. You identify your problems, solve them quickly, and keep going. No excuse literally.

I think balance comes from building multiple sources of truth. You can't rely on one voice, one dashboard, one perspective. As a CEO, you have to build a system whereby you force reality to meet you every day. I jump from where I'm sitting to a customer. My team doesn't like it, but it is what it is. I try to be what I call a triangle system: getting data from people, signals that are independent, and my gut. That is key. I try to understand that the truth is not in the boardroom; it's in the hedges. Talk to your sales team, talk to your customers, talk to engineering, talk to product. You hear things that my report will never capture. Once I tell my leadership team, 'Tell me the bad news quickly. I don't want to be surprised. Don't try to be cute. I want to know the problem you're solving for. The moment you are aware you've got a problem to solve, I want to know.' It helps me psychologically to make better decisions. The other piece is I do have people who challenge my thinking. They are experts in areas where I'm not. People tell me uncomfortable truths, and I'm used to that. I also have direct lines open where I bypass hierarchy. It could be email, WhatsApp, Slack. I talk to people across the entire company. Not for my management; I want to know the reality. One message from an engineer writing code can tell me more than a 30-page report on a project. The power rule also comes into play here. You don't need 100% of information to make a decision. If you do, it's already too late. So balancing intuition with data. Over time, you build your instinct as a CEO. You need data and your instinct. You can't say just instinct without data or data without instinct. There has to be a balance. One personal rule I have: if my instinct contradicts my data, I go deeper because something is wrong. One thing I do is talk to customers a lot across the spectrum. Nothing gives you clarity like hearing customers speak directly, unfiltered. You know exactly what to do. Customer truth trumps internal assumptions. So for me, my balance comes not from working less, but from seeing things more and seeing things more clearly. I want to see more and see it more clearly. That's the way I approach it. I'm still learning. It's a journey. In 2022, I went back to school, went to Columbia, did an EMBA program deliberately because I wanted to start another CEO journey. I wanted to have a peer group of CEOs who can say, 'Hey, how's it happening in your company? Why are you facing this problem?' It helps a lot having that network of people in your shoes who can be very frank with you. Plus, having a coach is very important.