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Africa is quietly becoming one of the hottest areas for fintech investment. I am overdue to focus on Africa here on the podcast, so when the chance to interview the CEO of the largest African fintech presented itself, I jumped at the opportunity. In a similar way to Latin America, Africa has leapfrogged from offline financial infrastructure to mobile-centric and the one company that has made much of this leapfrog possible, at least when it comes to payments, is Flutterwave.
My next guest on the Fintech One on One podcast is Olugbenga Agboola, who goes by GB, the CEO and Founder of Flutterwave, the most valuable fintech in Africa. I think of Flutterwave as a cross between Stripe, Shopify and Wise, and the technology they have built has revolutionized cross border payments in Africa. It is hard to overstate how important this one company has been to the growth of fintech in Africa.
In this podcast you will learn:
- What drove GB to found Flutterwave.
- A short history of fintech innovation in Africa.
- How he describes Flutterwave today.
- The geographic footprint of Flutterwave.
- How they enable African small businesses to accept cross border payments.
- The evolving payment behaviors for both consumers and small businesses.
- What they are ultimately solving for in Africa.
- What GB means when he says “payment is partnership”.
- How the money moves internationally.
- Why they decided to rebuild the entire stack of their API suite.
- How they are ensuring compliance across their wide network.
- How they incorporate financial inclusion into their company goals.
- Why they are an inaugural partner of the Circle Payments Network.
- How they are investing in cybersecurity and anti-fraud tools.
- How they are supporting the next generation of African fintech leaders.
- GB’s vision for the future of payments in Africa and for Flutterwave.
Read a transcription of our conversation below.
FINTECH ONE-ON-ONE PODCAST NO. 537 – OLUGBENGA “GB” AGBOOLA
Olugbenga “GB” Agboola: We’re solving for the defragmentation of payment infrastructure across Africa. The more you see that we’ve got really, really diverse payment types, it’s also, in a way, a testament to the fact that Africa has very, very developed payment systems. Every country has built a faster payment infrastructure. In Nigeria, if you spend money, you get the money in real-time. But if you spend money across the border, that’s where the problem is, right? Most merchant payments are disguised today as P2P payments because of the lack of proper infrastructure. Since we launched, we’ve been able to do that efficiently by making it easy for people to use whatever payment type they’ve got to pay merchants in their manner of choosing just to get a transaction to get them.
Peter Renton: This is the Fintech One-on-One Podcast, the show for fintech enthusiasts looking to better understand the leaders shaping fintech and banking today. My name is Peter Renton, and since 2013, I’ve been conducting in-depth interviews with intech founders and banking executives. Today on the show, we are talking African Fintech with the leader of the most valuable fintech company in all of Africa.
I am delighted to welcome Olugbenga Agboola, who goes by GB, thankfully. He is the CEO and founder of Flutterwave, the leading payments infrastructure company in Africa. It was great to finally get GB on the show, as I’ve been so impressed with what Flutterwave has been doing. They have basically solved the payments infrastructure challenges in Africa. That is not an easy thing to do, let me tell you. They’ve created a unified platform in a continent that has been so fragmented. You’ll find out how they did this in our conversation. Now, let’s get on with the show.
Welcome to the podcast, GB.
GB: Thanks, Peter. Thank you for having me. How are you?
PR: I’m great. I’m great. Thank you very much. Anyway, I like to get these things started by giving the listeners a little bit of background about yourself. And you’ve had a very interesting career, looking at your LinkedIn profile. There are stops in banking and fintech. Why don’t you give the listeners a little bit of the highlights of your career before Flutterwave?
GB: Thank you so much. Quick background: I started my career as an engineer, I think, almost 20 years ago now. I have worked across a bunch of companies like PayPal, GT Bank, Standard Bank of South Africa, which is Standard Bank Nigeria as well, Google, Access Bank, and Starling Bank, in a variety of roles for engineering, product management, and leading engineering efforts across all these companies in some way, shape, or form to deliver a digital payment strategy for these companies as well at scale. We’ve almost 10 years ago now to solve payment infrastructure for Africa at scale.
PR: What was it specifically that you saw that drove you to decide to start a company after spending a lot of time in the corporate world? What was the driving force for starting Flutterwave?
GB: The driving force has always been basically how do you make payments simple for Africa, right? I recall working for a bunch of banks across Africa before Flutterwave. And one of the problems that we identified has always been about how a merchant or a business, as a multinational, do payment across Africa. I recall one company that was trying to expand to Nigeria from South Africa. That company was not able to do so at scale because even though they were a bank back then, we couldn’t serve them with what they required because, obviously, every country is unique. So, I saw first that the need for a non-bank player who is willing to build a cross-border infrastructure, leveraging banking rails to solve that problem.
PR: Okay, so let’s talk about, before we get into Flutterwave, let’s talk about some of the highlights of how fintech has evolved. I think everybody knows the M-PESA story, but that was a long time ago now, almost two decades. Can you give us sort of how fintech has evolved in Africa since really the launch of M-PESA?
GB: Go back into history, one of the biggest things about mobile money has been the GSM revolution, right? Africa, as you probably know, leapfrogged from no phones to mobile phones, principally. And that’s because of the infrastructure gap that was in Africa. Once that got solved and GSM became a big thing across Africa, mobile money adoption grew rapidly, right? And that growth basically paved the way for digital payments at scale. With a mobile phone in the hands of every African, what could happen is just unprecedented, as we’ve seen, right? You know, from payments to greater economic growing and scaling, all of that basically are the positive effects of the GSM revolution, which I think has happened. That said, it was only natural for telcos to see that moving money into mobile phones was a natural cost of effect, you know, when this happened.
PR: Okay, so let’s talk about Flutterwave now. I think of Flutterwave as a sort of a combination of Stripe, Shopify, and Wise for Africa. Maybe you can…how do you describe it? And maybe you can describe what the core product offerings are.
GB: So Flutterwave is basically, first of all, a payment infrastructure. We’ve got a merchant service for businesses where your businesses get paid from anywhere in the world. If a business wants to receive money from their customers anywhere in the world, we are available for that service. That’s one. The second piece is remittances. We help Africans in diaspora send money back home to Africa. That’s who we are. But that said, we have to build a combination of so many solutions to power our products. And why is that? Because Africa sometimes requires a different approach to solving problems than just a copy and paste from the West. So we know that to enable online payments, we have to build an online system, an online store for merchants, especially small merchants, who might not be able to invest in technology. And using our platform, they’re able to sell and scale and get paid, right? So even though the end goal is payment, to get to a payment, we have to solve the underlying obstacles for payment at scale. Yeah.
PR: Okay. Okay. So I believe you’re a US company, right? I mean, I saw that you’re headquartered, I think in San Francisco. I know that as we’re talking today you’re in Nigeria, in your office there. What is the footprint of Flutterwave? Where are you located?
GB: Yes. So our personal HQ is Lagos, Nigeria, which is where we’re based from. Flutterwave is a proud Nigerian company that has scaled globally. We’ve got employees all over the world in multiple markets. Our culture is rooted in our purpose and our mission, right? We’re building the infrastructure that will help to lift millions of Africans into better prosperity because now they can get paid. Now they can access global opportunities. Now a small business in Nairobi or Accra or Johannesburg can sell to somebody in New York or in Berlin or in, you know, anywhere in the world they try, really. If they have a payment card, they’ve got a mobile wallet. With our reach and infrastructure, we can serve them, right? So we are basically a global company with local nuances, as we would call it. We’ve got our team literally everywhere, but 90% of our team is based locally in Nigeria.
PR: Okay, great. Then, let’s talk about cross-border payments. You said that you allow businesses to accept payments from anywhere in the world. Maybe you can talk about how you’re able to do that. How are you addressing the challenges that any business has in accepting cross-border payments?
GB: Right. So intelligent payments needs to be borderless. That’s the way we see it. And we need to connect the triad, all the payment types across all the markets we’re operating because that is the way you can solve that problem. When customers come, they don’t think borders. They think services. I want to get paid from this market. That’s it. And they come. They don’t think, oh, my customer is in Nairobi. My customer is in Dakar or Cairo. They just have a customer who wants to get paid from their platform, right? So that’s also the way payment has to be designed. Despite the fact that regulations, card schemes are not built that way, we have to design it like that and fashion that across the entire pain points. Because to be very frank, the real problem here is fragmentation of payment systems, and we need to solve that. So we want to make sure that, obviously, with how we solve a cross border, it’s solved anywhere by any customer. Anywhere they are in the world, they are able to pay or able to use a payment system in a simple way on our platform.
PR: So then let’s talk about the payments behavior and the data that you’ve gleaned from that because, you know, doing some research here, I know that you’ve done hundreds of millions of transactions. What are the key data insights that you can tell us about the evolving payment behaviors for both consumers and small businesses?
GB: So, increasing growth in APMs is where we help to drive and solve a lot of problems, right? In 2024, for example, we did a report that showed that a lot of the regions in Africa, they favor some specific APMs. And that’s because of the consumer preferences in those markets. Kenya is predominantly M-PESA, almost 100%. While Uganda is similar to mobile money as well. Ghana is really, really huge when it to mobile money penetration. When the Nigerians have a new payment type corporate bank transfer that is growing in a very huge manner. So we have to do what works for the customer and do what will actually help solve the problem they have at scale. Right? And beyond that, as we go to the other markets, you see massive growth happening there. And one of the biggest insights you see here is the consumer behavior is constantly evolving. And over here in Africa, payment isn’t really a luxury. It’s survival. With survival, people will use what they have to make that payment. That’s why you see people using what they have, like MoMo, like M-PESA. If in the US, I use what is more than just available for me. I can use my card, my credit card, my debit card, my Amex, and my Discover. Over here in Africa, that choice is not there. I use what works for me to survive in the market. So that’s the difference in what you see there. That’s a major data point that we see in our interactions.
PR: Right. So if someone is in Kenya using M-PESA, they can pay a company in Nigeria through M-PESA via Flutterwave?
GB: That is correct. Our payment system today equips all payment systems across the continent, at least most of them.
PR: Right. Okay. And so, I imagine that’s pretty fragmented, right? Because you’ve got obviously the ones that have scale. Do most countries in Africa have their own payment system that they’ve developed inside the country?
GB: Yes, they do. And that is interesting here. That’s what we’re solving for. We’re solving for the defragmentation of payment infrastructure across Africa. The more you see that we’ve got really, really diverse payment types, it’s also, in a way, it just sums up the fact that Africa has very, very developed payment systems. Every country has built faster payment infrastructure. In Nigeria, if you send money, you get the money in real-time. But if you send money across the border, that’s the where the problem is, right? Most merchant payments are disguised today as P2P payment because of a lack of proper infrastructure. Since we’ve launched, we’ve been able to do that efficiently by making it easy for people to use whatever payment type they’ve got to pay merchants in their manner of choosing just to get a transaction to get them.
PR: Okay, that’s really helpful. So then, I’ve heard you talk about this phrase, “Payment is partnership”. What do you mean by that exactly? And how are the partnerships bringing benefits for African businesses and consumers for that matter?
GB: So payment is really partnership because the payment infrastructure is a stack. It is stacked because there are so many things that make a payment system actually work. From card payment to TBP processors, to American Express, things we do for MTN, Airtel Africa, Safaricom, it’s really a stack, even though the customer sees just a payment button widget where they can pay on the checkout page. We have a partnership with American Express that opened up Nigerian businesses to a global audience. We have worked with Uber to give value to millions of drivers. We have long stood up with a partner network to support the livelihood of people sending money back home. We have built infrastructure that makes it easy for customers to actually get paid and also pay. So payment is really partnerships. You can’t build without proper partnership at scale. It doesn’t work that way.
PR: Yeah, that makes sense. Then, with talking about the technology stack that you’ve developed, can you explain maybe how you’re moving money? Is everything going through a banking system or you do have direct connections into all of these countries? How does money physically move around Africa?
GB: Money doesn’t move, instruction moves, okay?
PR: Right, okay.
GB: So we’ve got our banking partners who are responsible for settlement infrastructure at bulk. We have our partners who make sure that this actually is working at the right scale, right? All that is there. So once you go to the right banking partner, banking network, it becomes pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty simple to use. Yeah.
PR: You mentioned earlier this year that you were planning to launch a next-generation API. Where are you at with that? Can you elaborate on what you’re actually trying to achieve there?
GB: Right. So our APIs are channels to our platform. APIs are how customers will engage our platform and use our APIs. We decided to rethink our API suite and said, if we were to build Flutterwave for 2025, what would the API look like? And that was the foundation of rebuilding the entire stack for our API suite. We have what we call the NextGen API platform. It’s currently in pilot. It is setting the new standard for Africa’s infrastructure, with AI being center and front for this. This advancement has the potential to impact Africa’s ecosystem by enabling our customers to pay and get paid with native options to their own customers. We’re able to, for example, if you’re a customer who typically uses M-PESA and you go to a merchant A, we will apply that preference to that merchant. If you go to another merchant, the first option you will see will be M-PESA. Unless you’ve left Kenya, you’re now in Nigeria, where we’ll give you the next best option to M-PESA in that market. All of that intelligence is built into our new API. And that’s where we think our customers will have a better experience in accessing Flutterwave.
PR: Okay. So, you know, given that you’re active in so many countries, every country not only has their own payments infrastructure, right? It’s got their own regulatory environment. So how are you managing that, ensuring compliance across this wide network?
GB: So compliance is important for us. We’ve invested heavily in our regulatory compliance and risk infrastructure in the last couple of years. We’ve ensured that every market we’re operating in, we have the right licenses, the right partners to scale that market. For example, in the US, we now have a lot of US money transmission licenses, which we got in the last couple of months to ensure that our remittance business is 100% within the right compliance framework. We’ve also built monitoring systems that ensure that in every market we operate in, we are aligned with our stakeholders to ensure that we’re doing things the right way and with the right scale in mind as well. Today, we’re arguably the most licensed non-bank entity across the continent. And that speaks to our testament of compliance. We used to want to operate…we want to operate the right way. We know that payment is a trust business. I want to try our best when it comes to our customers.
PR: Right, right. So when people talk about Africa, they often talk about the financial inclusion piece where so many of the country didn’t have access to any kind of financial services. And now, with the growth of mobile technology, as you mentioned, that has changed. So, how do you incorporate financial inclusion into your goals as a company at Flutterwave?
GB: Financial inclusion is very, very important. And the reason why it’s important is because of how it increases the share of the pie, if you get what I’m saying. That is very, very key because of the opportunity that comes from including more people in the ecosystem. That’s also very important for us as a company. And we have constantly invested in ensuring that we let our technology be platform-agnostic, right? So that if your customer in a rural area wants to pay on a platform, when I check out pay today, beyond cards, you will see pay with U.S.S.D. [Unstructured Supplementary Service Data], which is basically pay with text. They’ll install something in your phone to make payments. We’ve built all of that infrastructure because we understand the value here and we see the opportunity. So this makes sense to us, and we see why it’s important. And for us, everything we can do to ensure more Africans are included in this ever-growing digital payments world is just the right thing to do.
PR: Right. So, let’s talk about new types of payments rails. I was reading just recently that you are one of the inaugural partners of the Circle Payments Network that has just been announced recently by Circle. Obviously, they’re the stablecoin company behind USDC. Tell us a little bit about what you’re doing there and what the plans are.
GB: So we believe very strongly in how we can obviously make payments even simpler. So when Circle started building that network, we saw the opportunity there. And then we basically tried our very best to include that in our platform. The Circle payment network basically is revolutionizing how money will move across the world. And we being a part of that gives our customers another option to, obviously, be a part of that. As I said earlier, payment is partnership. Circle Payment Network is another example of how we reached a partnership to give our customers the best opportunity to move money across the continent.
PR: Gotcha. So let’s talk about security, cybersecurity, and the risks that anyone doing business, really anywhere in the world, has to have rock-solid anti-fraud measures in place. Tell us what Flutterwave is doing to mitigate these potential security risks.
GB: So I follow with, we’ve done a huge investment in cybersecurity. And we did that because of our leadership and category leader position in payments, right? Obviousl,y you’ve seen a huge increase in fraud and security issues in recent years. But it’s not just one company’s affair. I think it’s a global thing. It concerns everybody. And we are constantly making plans to solve that problem. One key way is cross-sector collaboration, which we’ve done in recent times. We’ve partnered with the EFCC, for example, to basically think about how we can help them to understand a new way to fight cybercrime using our platform that we’ve done. We’ve also had you know, a new C-suite executive he is French, you know, he spent years at Ida’s, Nike, banks. Hebrings that wealth of experience to our platform for huge, huge scale, right? That’s what we have done. So we’re constantly reinvesting and investing in ensuring that our platform is top-notch secure. Now customers can rest easy, knowing that with Flutterwave, you are entirely home and secure.
PR: Okay, so given your unique position as a leadership position in fintech in Africa, I’m curious about, beyond the payments infrastructure, how are you supporting the startup ecosystem in Africa?
GB: So to be very frank, we see our self and our work as being very, very important and pivotal, right? We’re investing in a lot of human capital development by empowering our youth through our training programs, fundraise workshops, fintech evenings. Those are things that we do to show the ecosystem understands the scale of what we’ve done, as well as how to even make it further. Beyond that, we’ve trained young ladies and women entrepreneurs, you know, with mentorship and funding. We’ve done a lot of collaboration with, for example, the Small and Medium Enterprises Agency of Nigeria. We’ve done the same thing with the EFCC of Nigeria. But the whole goal here is how do we contribute to the knowledge and the know-how in the ecosystem, right? Recently, I was at Semafor in DC, the World Economic Summit, where I echoed the African voice in my conversation. And the goal there really is to ensure that Africa has a voice and the ecosystem at large is well represented. And we’re doing our best to support the work that we’ve done whilst giving back in whatever we can.
PR: Are you investing in other companies in Africa or not?
GB: Not right now.
PR: Okay. Africa is a fascinating place. A lot of American investors are paying much more attention to Africa now than ever before. There’s a lot of investment going into Africa. But I’d like to sort of maybe get your sense, when you’re looking at the future of payments in Africa, maybe take us through what your vision is and what role Flutterwave is going to play in that vision.
GB: So the role that we’re going to play when it comes to Africa payments over the long term, is really how about scale, right? In the same way Africa went from no phone to mobile phone, you see us go from not having payment straight to advanced payment. You’ve seen, for example, stables, crypto becoming very huge in Africa. And that’s because of how Africa adopted technology, and how quickly it scales in Africa, right? So you see a lot more mobile, more seamlessly embedded. You will see that it’s very infrastructure-led, which is why the work we’re doing right now is so important. And it’s going to help to grow and scale into African trade, attracting even more investment to Africa. You will see that going up and across the board. And that is so, so, so key.
PR: Okay, well, we’ll have to leave it there, GB. I really do appreciate you coming on the show today and making the time. Fascinating chat with you, and best of luck.
GB: Thank you so much. See you. Bye.
PR: I think Africa needed a company like Flutterwave to be successful. The combination of Stripe, Shopify, and Wise, as I said, means that new fintech companies can be created leveraging the backbone of the Flutterwave infrastructure. In fact, it has ramifications far beyond fintech or even technology. If you are an African entrepreneur in any industry, you no longer need to think about how to expand across borders in Africa. It is a solved problem. That in and of itself creates more opportunities and becomes a virtuous cycle. Exciting times for Africa, indeed.
Anyway, that’s it for today’s show. If you enjoy these episodes, please go ahead and subscribe, tell a friend, or leave a review. And thank you so much for listening.